


this is me trying.

by milominderbinder



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Andrew is Hufflepuff's star keeper and hates it, Hogwarts AU, Hufflepuff Andrew, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Pining Andrew, Quidditch AU, Slytherin Neil, andrew and neil figuring out what adulthood and the future look like for them, past abuse mentioned but not explicit, this is a 'what happens AFTER neil's dad is arrested and neil is safe' kind of fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:48:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 40,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26266000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/milominderbinder/pseuds/milominderbinder
Summary: In May, Andrew has a chance encounter with an interesting little runaway in Hogsmeade.In July, a resurgent circle of Death Eaters are arrested and sentenced to life in Azkaban.In September, finally safe from his father, a Quidditch-obsessed mystery named Neil Josten arrives at Hogwarts just in time for 7th year — and just in time to completely get under Andrew’s skin.
Relationships: Neil Josten/Andrew Minyard, other canon pairings mentioned/minor
Comments: 82
Kudos: 430
Collections: AFTG Big Bang 2020





	1. chapter one

**Author's Note:**

> so here's my fic for the aftg big bang ! it's complete & i'll be posting one chapter per day for the next 5 days!
> 
> thank you so much to alonewithabook for beta'ing, and my two amazing artists black-glasses-and-books & Puffins-studio ❤️
> 
> (also, just a short note, i wrote this back at the start of the year and given stuff that's happened since then, posting it now makes me wanna add a disclaimer that like,,, harry potter & hogwarts AUs mean a lot to me, but i'm as disgusted by the author's views as any other queer and i'm not writing hp shit out of any kind of support of her)

**MAY**

The gentle May sun paints pale gold across the Hogwarts grounds like a watercolour, curling through the grass and over stone circles, draping blanket-warm over the rickety structure of the bridge, dappling the stone walls of the grand castle. The soft hoot of owls circling the tallest tower echoes all the way down, to mingle with the soft chirping of crickets and the murmuring of doxies in the outskirts of the woods. Just outside the castle steps, a patch of glowing bluebells are hovering, buoyant and captivating, in a particularly luxurious patch of sunlight.

Everything is perfect tranquility, nothing but the hum of magic through the air to shroud the quiet grounds.

And then Andrew Minyard’s black combat boot lands splat in the middle of the bluebells, and squashes them to pieces.

Andrew looks down with an unimpressed eye as he keeps on walking, spitting a tobacco-coloured glob of saliva back over his shoulder, where it lands like an insult directly in the centre of the squashed flowers. Not a one of them is glowing anymore, as they fucking shouldn’t be, Andrew thinks, while he stomps his way back onto the loose earth path leading away from the castle. 

“Andrew, did you have to do that? Those are rare!”

The voice, just a few steps behind him and hurrying to catch up despite having legs twice as long as his, is his cousin. Nicky is wearing an obnoxiously bright Hufflepuff scarf, and Andrew doesn’t particularly want to be seen with him, no matter that everybody in Hogwarts knows they’re cousins already. Kevin’s volunteering to help clean the Quidditch equipment with Professor Wymack, something Andrew considers like a voluntary detention and will have no part in. Aaron’s taking Kaitlyn, and they left already, so there’s already a sour taste under Andrew’s tongue. 

He’d be happy going alone, but that’s not really how this works. There are only three people at Hogwarts he has under the careful coop of his wing, and if one of them doesn’t have a reason to be anywhere else, they’re bound to be with Andrew. Unfortunately, this means he’s stuck with Nicky.

“So? What do I care if they die out.” He’s being deliberately contrary, but so what? Nicky, who is taking Herbology at NEWT this year and cares about it more than Andrew has ever cared about anything, gets so annoying over plants that Andrew feels pretty much obligated to entirely dislike them. It’s not like few glowing flowers are doing much for the world. 

“You don’t know what effect certain types of flowers could be having on the ecosy––” Nicky’s off on a rant. Andrew, far enough away from the castle now that he doesn’t think a professor has eyes on him any longer, reaches deep into his pocket, and pulls out a muggle cigarette. He lights it with a tap of his wand, and blows smoke back into Nicky’s face as he continues the stomp down the winding woodland path to Hogsmeade.

A few steps later, he sees another patch of glowing bluebells. He detours to crush them, too, and Nicky doesn’t shut up the whole rest of the walk.

* * *

  
Andrew Minyard tolerates Hogsmeade for exactly three reasons.

These reasons are: the sweets at Honeydukes –– the moment he first tasted a toffee-cauldron was the moment he decided this wizarding world maybe wasn’t so bad after all –– the cakes at Puddifoots –– much as the rest of the place is hideous, he’ll brave a few hideous pink cupids blowing confetti in his ears if it means he can get a to-go bag of the most sinful custard doughnuts he’s ever tasted –– and, of course, the butterbeer at The Three Broomsticks. You can sometimes get butterbeer from the Hogwarts kitchens, on special occasions, but it’s never as good as stuff straight from the pub. Andrew has an intense aversion to pumpkin juice, so the monthly trips to Hogsmeade are the only times he really enjoys his drinks.

“Where do you want to go first? I need to nip to the post office to see if there’s anything from Erik, and that carnivorous daisy ate my last quill, so I’d better pop in and get a few more of those from the stationer’s as well –– I noticed you were almost out of black ink, you should go there with me at least. And wouldn’t it be nice to get something else to decorate the dorm with? It’s seeming so bland this year.”

Andrew’s jaw twitches in annoyance, and he stares dead ahead, sucking in the last few bitter drags of his cigarette while Nicky chatters in his ear as the town comes into view. Andrew doesn’t believe in regrets, especially over things you couldn’t fucking help, but if he did, being sorted into the same house as his cousin would certainly be one of them.

Really, though. Hufflepuff? Andrew still feels a sense of disdain every time he remembers his own sunny yellow tie, or the cosy underground burrow that passes for a common room. At least it’s not high up –– if he were in Ravenclaw with Aaron he’d get vertigo every day, Andrew thinks bitterly –– but he could have been in Slytherin. Like Kevin, who is a whiny baby that doesn’t deserve a cool aesthetic. Andrew thinks houses are dumb, but he’d rather be in a quiet, dark room covered in snake emblems, with an underwater window where you can watch the lake, than fucking suffocating in Hufflepuff cheer.

“Alternate plan,” says Andrew, tossing the butt of his cigarette aside –– right into the path of an approaching third year, all eager-eyed and acne-plastered with a Zonko’s bag in hand, who squeals and jumps back when she sees who just flicked it at her. She startledly holds his gaze for one long moment, before Andrew bares his teeth at her and she scarpers in the other direction.

“Andrew, I really wish you wouldn’t scare the cute little kiddies like that.”

“Alternate plan,” Andrew repeats, like he didn’t hear Nicky. “You do all that boring shit by yourself, buy me some ink when you’re at the stationer’s, and meet me in Honeydukes after.”

He can feel a headache building at the base of his temples and he’d rather cut that off before it can get a hold of him, because once Andrew’s headaches set in, they don’t leave all day. He knows from experience that a strict anti-Nicky’s-rambling diet will stop the pain in its tracks.

Nicky, of course, starts to say something else, but Andrew wanders off before he can hear a word of it.

Hogsmeade Square is what most people would call _cute_ , all old cobblestones with a bubbling fountain in the middle, quaint shops painted in cheerful colours surrounding it. Crowds of students are flocking in and out of most of the doors –– sporting their weekend garb, they all look very different, but most are still colourful and adorned with house scarves, bags of sweets and school supplies and beauty potions and dungbombs slung across their elbows, travelling in packs of friends and chattering excitedly. As Andrew crosses the square, a few girls gather around one with her wand out and watch as she makes a small stone frog at the edge of the fountain come to life and leap into the water, splashing them. They all squeal and leap away, and then come back together in the next moment like a giggling heap, drawn together like magnets, their high pitched voices cutting through the air.

Andrew looks away from them, stomach turning. He tolerates Hogsmeade for exactly three reasons: Honeydukes sweets, Puddifoots pastries, and Three Broomsticks butterbeer. But the most _insufferable_ part of it all is the other students, buoyed with cheer and exuberance for their rare day trip out of the castle. The worst part of almost everything in Andrew’s life is his peers.

“Watch where you’re going,” Andrew says flatly, darkly, as a boy he recognises from the year below –– although he’s a head taller than Andrew, Andrew never forgets a face –– gets distracted by keeping a paper airplane in the air with the gentle guide of his wand, and nearly goes crashing right into Andrew’s shoulder. The boy leaps right back from him, spluttering something as he knocks his dark curls out of his eyes, but Andrew ignores him as soon as he gets out of the way. He’s got his eyes set on Honeydukes across the square, and getting there before it’s too crowded with the other brats at Hogwarts is the only thing which will make this day bearable.

Ten minutes later, Andrew is escaping Honeydukes with his pockets stuffed full of sweets, and an uncomfortable cloying feeling crawling down the back of his neck. He hates crowded shops, all the people pushing against you with no regard for personal space, accidental touches from people he didn’t know were behind him setting like the sharp tip of a cursing wand against his skin over and over again. He should have got here earlier and beat the crowds of babbling friend-groups who seemingly all just _have_ to crowd into shops together when none of them actually have anything to buy.

Escaping into the fresh, pleasantly warm air does little to improve his mood, but at least it stops his spine itching so much. He needs a cigarette. Better to avoid Nicky for a while longer, too, he decides, if he wants any peace in this whole long day, so he stands to the side of the shop, staring across the Hogsmeade town square in apathy, as he shakes one cigarette out of his pack and lights it with a press of his wand.

This, of course, is precisely when he sees Professor Song marching out of the trinket shop across the street.

“Merlin’s fucking ballsack,” Andrew grumbles to himself, and immediately turns his back, ducking into the dark cover of the alleyway between Honeydukes and the apothecary next door. The last thing he needs now is to get busted for smoking muggle cigarettes by the strictest Head of Hufflepuff that Hogwarts has ever seen. It’s not that Andrew really cares if she knows he’s doing something against the rules –– it’s just that he only just got out of his last lot of detentions with her, and she picks the most heinous things to make him do.

Hiding is definitely preferable. Andrew sucks a deep drag of his cigarette as he ducks further down the alley, his black boots slipping a little against the cobblestones. The alley is cast in shadow, and colder than it is out in the full reach of the spring sunshine.

He blames that for why it takes him a moment to notice.

He’s not alone in the alley.

There’s a kid there. He’s crouched at the other end, only half his body sticking out from behind the bin against the apothecary’s side of the alley, and he seems to be hastily stuffing several things into a ratty backpack, which Andrew can only barely make out the details of in the darkness of the alley. As bad as his viewing angle is, Andrew’s sharp mind takes in several details all at once: the kid is probably about Andrew’s age, but with a small frame, skinny and short. He has brown hair falling long enough to touch his shoulders and cover his eyes, a good shield, but not hiding his sharp cheekbones or the pronounced cupid’s bow of his lips. He’s wearing muggle clothes several sizes too big. Something else that looks several sizes too big is the cauldron, which he’s somehow now managed to zip into the small backpack, which he then frantically slings onto his back. He stands up, turns, and meets Andrew’s eyes, startling backwards like he’s just been caught in something hideous.

Andrew’s mind wages a war on itself instantly. The battle is his two instincts: this guy is probably dangerous, versus, this guy is so _fucking_ attractive.

Andrew really hates himself sometimes.

The kid can either magically sense gay panic or just knows when to take a good opportunity, because his deer-in-the-headlights look disappears and he suddenly darts towards Andrew. Andrew’s got him pinned in, see, because the alley only ends in a brick wall at the other side –– this part of Hogsmeade is dug right into the side of the mountain. His only exit is past Andrew, and for a moment it seems like his frantic scramble of feet and determination will get him there. Except, unfortunately for this kid, he doesn’t know much about Andrew Minyard.

He doesn’t know how fast Andrew is at drawing a wand.

He does it reflexively. He does it because anyone so eager to run away means they must either be some sort of threat or be scared of some sort of threat, and any of that in the current world –– with the whispers of the re-rising Death Eaters, with the new anti-Statute of Secrecy faction starting riots nearly every week –– might pose a threat to the people Andrew cares about too. So Andrew cracks his wand down and sends a thick strip of magic up at the entrance to the alley, shimmering like a waterfall, and the kid crashes right into it, trapped.

He tries again, to his credit, pushing against the magical wall in the shadows of their private alleyway, before his shoulders hunch in defence and he turns, slowly and cautiously, to face Andrew.

“I haven’t seen you at Hogwarts,” Andrew says, casual as anything, while taking another drag of his cigarette, wand still dangling from the fingers of his other hand.

“It’s a big school.” The kid’s voice is deep and interesting. His accent is familiar, but posher than Andrew’s. His vowels drag like honey. His tone is aiming for casual but coming off cautious.

“Not for me.” Some would argue the opposite, considering how short Andrew is and how much more effort it takes him to walk between classes, but he’s not talking about that. “I remember everyone. No, you’re not a student, and you haven’t been recently. But you have an English accent –– London, is it, or somewhere further south? –– so you’re not just visiting.”

Homeschooled? It’s not entirely unheard of to have a homeschooled witch or wizard, but it’s usually the old pureblood lines who don’t want their kids contaminated by the common sorts at Hogwarts. This kid doesn’t look like that. Andrew’s never met a pureblood who’d let their kid dress up in muggle jeans, let alone jeans with holes in, and go rifling through the rubbish outside a low-rate shop.

“So I’m homeschooled, what’s it to you?” the boy asks, in the same instant that Andrew has already decided that’s not possible.

“You don’t say?” Andrew eyes him coolly. “So why is a homeschooled wizard crouched in an alley in Hogsmeade, on Hogwarts visiting weekend, stealing an old cauldron from a dirty alleyway?”

“You think I was stealing a cauldron? That clearly wouldn’t fit in here, you’re nuts,” the kid says, plucking one strap of his backpack with one hand. He still looks twitchy, and is stood as close to Andrew’s magical barrier as possible –– his posture is aiming for nonchalant, but all his weight is on his back foot, poised to escape if Andrew presumably made so much as an inching gesture towards him.

“Clearly,” Andrew mocks, “There is an undetectable extension charm on that bag. Who knows what else you’ve got stuffed in there.”

If the kid was not-quite succeeding in looking nonchalant, he certainly fails at it when Andrew says that. His hand clenches around the strap of his backpack and he takes another stumbling step back, until he’s pushed right against the barrier of Andrew’s magic.

Andrew considers him. He’s sort of retreating now, but a moment ago, it had been recognisable that he was leaning into the smoke of the muggle cigarette still burning down in Andrew’s fingers.

Feeling flippantly whimsical in a way he almost never is, Andrew pulls out the pack and offers the kid a cigarette.

It looks like the process of deciding whether to take it or not might bust the kid’s whole brain right open, but eventually he stops and starts his way to it, and pulls one out of the pack carefully with his fingertips. He fidgets with it tentatively for so long that Andrew’s about to snap and ask him whether he plans on smoking the damn thing or just fingering it, but then the kid pulls out a lighter from his pocket and lights it all in the same movement.

He doesn’t actually do more than take a couple of drags before letting it burn down between his fingers and inhaling the smoke that way, but it’s enough to appease Andrew, who watches through evaluating eyes. This entire encounter is by far the most interesting thing to happen to Andrew all year, and he doesn’t quite know what’s going on at all. Andrew always knows what’s going on. Being lost like this is not a pleasant feeling, is so unpleasant actually that it’s plucking at his stomach irritatingly, but it’s certainly the closest he’s come to experiencing any real emotion at all in a long while, and the deep dark black hole that Andrew usually considers his mood is just the tiniest bit buoyed by that, somehow.

So he watches, while this strange encounter goes on, puffing away on his own cigarette silently as the kid clearly waits for whatever invisible signal will make Andrew let him go. Andrew doesn’t know what to make of any of this –– the kid doesn’t _seem_ like he’s part of some Death Eater revival cult, but you can never be certain of such things, and the magical world is pretty small, there’s not many other shady reasons for someone young to not be in Hogwarts or secluded up in a pureblood palace somewhere. His pretty face and razor-sharp cheekbones, underneath the tragedy of limp brown hair, have nothing to do with any of this, but certainly aren’t dampening Andrew’s curiosity.

The kid is holding his borrowed cigarette in one hand, but the other is fidgeting, clicking his lighter between his fingers a few times beside his pocket. Andrew’s gaze follows the noise, observing the faint scars on the kid’s knuckles in the dim light of the alley, and then glancing to the heavy silver lighter, covered with ornate carvings. It looks halfway like a Zippo, but it’s not –– it’s a magical lighter, Andrew can tell just from looking, no space for any lighter fluid in there, just two tiny sharpened points of a charm and a jinx which spark when you pull them apart. Andrew wonders if he should reconsider the kid being a pureblood. That thing looks like real silver, and old to boot.

Fractals of possible questions splinter and arrange themselves in infinite forms in Andrew’s mind, but before he can sort any of them to the front of his careful tongue, there’s a sudden noise at the other end of the alley. It’s an employee of the apothecary, lurid purple apron and all, coming out of the side door, a bin bag levitated in front of her. The noise of the door cracking against the wall when she swings it open is enough to startle the other boy, who jumps and flings himself towards Andrew’s magic wall so hard that Andrew, too, loses his concentration for a moment, and drops his charm. The second it’s down, the boy drops his cigarette, yanks his hood over his muddy hair, and darts out of the alleyway quick as a kneazle, before the apothecary assistant can spot him and before Andrew can say another word.

Andrew considers chasing him, but the employee has spotted him in the flurry of motion that the other boy left behind.

“Hey! Kid, you can’t smoke down here, get that muggle shit outta here!” the woman objects, moving towards Andrew with a shooing motion and a frown. Andrew rolls his eyes and drops the last centimetre of his cigarette onto the ground with the other boy’s abandoned one, scraping them both into the concrete with the heel of his boot and then retreating without a word.

Except –– when he’s only two steps out of the alley, there’s a scattered noise of someone hurrying along the cobblestones behind him. “Wait, alright, you dropped your lighter.”

Andrew always lights his cigarettes with his wand.

He spins just in time for the apothecary assistant to press an ornately decorated silver lighter into his hand. She disappears back into the shop, and Andrew is left staring down at a remnant of the mysterious boy from just a few moments before. It must have fallen out of his pocket while he was racing away.

Andrew turns it over in his hand and considers it for so long that he’s sure he will be seeing every marking on it in his dreams that night. Then he sticks it safely into the back pocket of his jeans, and reluctantly heads off to find Nicky.

Call it a souvenir of a mysterious encounter. He’s sure nothing will ever come of it; nothing all that interesting sticks around in Andrew’s life for long.

**JUNE**

The enchanted calendar in their dorm flips itself to June the next week, an event not noteworthy to Andrew except that it marks one week closer to graduating next year, one less week he has to endure Hogwarts ever again. It’s not that he hates school –– Andrew rarely cares about anything enough to hate it –– it’s just that the place is a drudgery, and Andrew, who is trying very hard every single day to not give up on life altogether, can’t find anything much worth sticking around for. The only reason he didn’t drop out after OWLs last year was because he’d never leave Kevin, Aaron and Nicky unprotected at school.

So here he still is, taking three NEWTs he couldn’t care less about, sleeping fitfully every night in a room full of other people with no lock on the door, trudging through each day. But, now, for one less month.

And, now, apparently, with a new lighter in his pocket. It’s been a week, and Andrew’s still carrying around the interesting little charmed object. Upon closer inspection, it’s even more expensive than he’d first assumed –– it’s not just solid silver, it looks goblin-forged. The kind that only old pureblood families are ever in possession of. Andrew would rethink his assessment of the kid’s status, except that he still looked like a homeless muggle, so he still doesn’t make sense.

Andrew reminds himself, every time he remembers this, that the kid is not something he needs to solve. He was a fleeting encounter, and Andrew has no solid reason to be suspicious of him in any way, and he’s never going to see him again, either. It’s moot. And Andrew doesn’t do curiosity.

Nine days after the Hogsmeade trip, Andrew is aggressively slathering strawberry jam across several slices of toast while Nicky chatters on about his latest letter from Erik. It’s the earlier side of breakfast, because there’s Quidditch practice for the Hufflepuff team that morning, so most of the non-Quidditch-players are still in bed. Andrew doesn’t like getting up early, but he does like getting first dibs on the food. Beside his jam-drenched toast, he has the biggest chocolate croissant available already tucked onto his plate.

The rest of the team are eating at the other end of the table with the couple of keen first-years who are up this early of their own accord –– all still wary of Andrew, they keep him at arms length when they can help it. This suits Andrew just fine, and apparently it suits his brother, too, because a second after Andrew takes his first voracious bite of chocolate croissant, Aaron’s Ravenclaw bookbag swings into the seat beside him. It is swiftly followed by Aaron himself.

“Wrong table,” Andrew observes idly, with his mouth full, as if he’s not the one who insisted Aaron sit at the Hufflepuff table with him for the first five years of their education anyway. Things have been different after OWLs, of course –– the original deadline of their deal, made on the train on their very first day at school as fresh-faced eleven year olds who had only just found out they were half of a whole. Now, Aaron usually sits at the Ravenclaw table with Katelyn, and Andrew usually doesn’t acknowledge his existence.

“Yeah, well, they were fresh out of psychopaths for company at the ‘Claw table, what was I supposed to do,” Aaron grumbles. He’s never personable before his coffee. He’s never really very personable at all. Andrew just rolls his eyes and returns to his croissant, and Nicky, who had been cautiously waiting across the table to see the outcome of all that, brightens when he realises Aaron is staying.

“I haven’t talked to you since Hogsmeade, Aaron!” Nicky observes, as he digs into his bowl of Owl-O’s. Being both a different house and the year above, it’s a lot harder for Nicky and Aaron to see each other than it is for Andrew to see either of them. His rotten luck. “Did you have a nice time with Kaaaatelyn? Come on, I need the goss!”

“Ugh.” Aaron pours himself a mug of black coffee from the carafe in the middle of the table, not stopping until the mug’s so full it’s nearly sloshing over the sides. “It was fine. Nothing exciting happened. How about you guys?”

Aaron always engages Nicky more than Andrew would, and that small amount is enough to send Nicky off onto a whole tumble of words, which will probably last all the way up until Quidditch practice if they let him. Andrew begins arranging his slices of jam-covered toast in a stack, five high.

“Oh, it was great! Andrew was a grump, of course, but I ditched him for a while and I found this really cute quill set selling off cheap in the stationer’s. It has ink which changes colour depending on your mood as you write, so fun! Of course, ‘stressed’ just comes out black, so considering I’m just stressed every time I write any of my NEWT essays, I’m sure the professors will think I just bought boring black ink. But it’s still cute. Andrew managed to clear out half of Honeydukes, as usual. I seriously don’t know how you afford that many sweets every month, Andrew.”

Andrew works all summer every summer bussing tables in Knockturn Alley’s grungiest pub, has won five essay competitions with galleon prizes, and always fixes his old possessions with magic instead of ever replacing them. He’s not surprised his cousin doesn’t know any of that, though. 

“I’m great at extreme couponing,” he says, deadpan, and bites into his stacked pieces of toast all at once.

They’re all spared more painstaking conversation by the screech of an early wave of owls, arriving with the first post. Nicky perks up excitedly, as he always does when the post comes, in case it carries news from his boyfriend at Durmstrang. Aaron watches for his daily copy of the Prophet. Andrew never gets post, so he doesn’t bother looking up. He’d rather spare his half-lidded gaze for his breakfast.

Except. Today. A uniformly official tawny owl drops a _Prophet_ in front of Aaron, and Erik’s familiar snowy owl drops a sappy envelope covered in doodles of hearts. But then, after a moment, a tiny, scraggly looking bird crashes onto the table after them, _splashing_ into a jug of orange juice and dropping a thin roll of parchment right into Andrew’s toast.

“Who’s that for?” Nicky asks, startled, as he helps the bird up. It shakes out its sodden wings and then immediately takes off again, clearly not having been told to wait for any sort of reply. “You should pass it down the table, it might be for one of the first years.”

Andrew looks down at the letter, and notices that although the parchment looks ragged and re-used, the wax seal is rather ornate, with the imprint of a tiny cauldron in it. An uneasy feeling settles into the pit of Andrew’s stomach, and everything around him feels a little foggy as he breaks the seal open.

“Wait, Andrew, is that for _you ––”_ His cousin’s voice fades into the background, and Andrew only just has the presence of mind to elbow Aaron in the ribs when he tries to peer over Andrew’s shoulder at the note.

It’s hardly prolific. The ink is black and splotchy, and the handwriting is messy in a way that is unmistakably the work of an identity-masking quill, the kind they have to take blind-marked exams with to avoid professor bias. 

_Look after that lighter for me, yeah? I’ll need it back at some point._

Andrew stares at the scrap of parchment for ten long seconds before crumpling it into a ball and shoving it deep into the pocket of his robes. 

“Andrew, what the fuck was that?” Aaron asks beside him, as Andrew is swimming back out of his foggy mind and into the crisp lens of reality. “You _never_ get post.”

Andrew shoves half his chocolate croissant in his mouth in one go, and stands up.

“Time for practice,” he says, through a mouthful of pastry, and snaps his fingers at Nicky. “Last one of the year. Chop chop.”

**JULY**

Nicky and Aaron had argued for weeks over whether they should look for a flat in Diagon Alley or Hogsmeade for the summer. There were pluses and minuses to both plans –– Hogsmeade was cheaper and would would mean that the twins could visit on weekends during term time too, but if they were in Diagon summer jobs would be easier, as would the job Nicky had secured at _Flitterbloom’s Herbology Emporium_ now that he’d graduated. Eventually Andrew knocked their heads together and told them to flip a coin. So they were now renting a flat in Hogsmeade.

It was fine. Andrew didn’t care much about where he lived; it was over a shop so it was noisy in the day, but quiet at night, and it was tiny and grungy inside, but he had his own bedroom with a door that locked. There was a fireplace, so he could floo to work at the pub in Knockturn Alley, and now that he was seventeen they were letting him bartend instead of just bussing tables. None of it was very exciting, but everything was far more fine than it ever had been before in his life.

So there is really no excuse that after a month, he feels like he’s going slightly stir-crazy. Andrew hadn’t known he still cared enough about life to be _able_ to go stir-crazy, so it is in some ways a novelty, and in some ways a maddening reminder of emotion: how his brain still feels numb to it, but there’s some sort of itchy boredom under his skin each night as he serves another dead-slow shift at the pub and immediately gets in the floo back to Hogsmeade, to the bickering of his brother and cousin, and Kevin barging his way in to make sure they’re eating a boring healthy dinner more often than not. Not even the pub’s butterbeer supplier who he’s been exchanging handjobs with in the back room once a week, Roland, is enough to keep him entertained.

July is nearing its end, and even the drab English weather has decided to embrace the summer, so Andrew is sweating through his black clothes as he trails Kevin into _Quality Quidditch Supplies_ one Saturday, Nicky and Aaron lagging behind them. Andrew had only agreed to this outing because it would at least be something different to the rest of his summer routine –– well, that and because he knew Kevin would be annoying as hell otherwise. Summer really isn’t Andrew’s season, though. He can go with a sleeveless shirt, but the black armbands and heavy black boots mean he’s constantly sweltering regardless. A drop of sweat drips down from his forehead and underneath his also-black sunglasses, and Andrew glares at Kevin ahead of him. Like most bad things in Andrew’s life, this is all Kevin’s fault. The triple-scoop ice cream from Florean Fortescue’s that Andrew is clutching is the only reason he hasn’t hit Kevin over the head yet today.

“And the new Cleansweep is supposed to be a _huge_ leap up, which is surprising considering they’ve always played it safe with their reputation as the family broom, but they’re so solid in that charmwork that if they _did_ decide to go into racing brooms it could be a really big deal, so I want to make sure I’m the first to check it out.”

“You are absolutely insufferable,” Andrew informs him, just as they reach the Quidditch shop, and Kevin reaches out to push at the handle. Andrew glances over his shoulder to make sure Nicky and Aaron haven’t lagged too far behind –– 

And. Then.

It’s not that he’d totally given up on seeing the boy from Hogsmeade again; he’d just deliberately not put much effort into thinking about it. If Andrew let himself be intrigued by a boy he’d met for a grand total of three minutes, he was bound to end up down all sorts of dangerous paths. So he’s focused on work, and his family, and trying to distract Kevin’s big head from Quidditch, and riling Kevin up by refusing to practice with him all summer even though _it’s only three years until the next World Cup, Andrew!_ and learning how to tread around the careful edges of his own sex drive with Roland. And he hasn’t thought about that boy in Hogsmeade, even though his strange silver lighter has been in Andrew’s pocket for nearly three months, and he feels the always-cool metal every time he puts his hand in there.

Until today, just as Kevin walks into the Quidditch shop and Aaron trips on a cobblestone behind them and Andrew’s Drooble’s bubblegum ice cream is dripping off the cone and onto the pad of his hand, he glances around, and sees a maddeningly familiar face stood just down the street.

The boy looks different to before, though. No longer quite so homeless, for one. He’s still wearing muggle clothes and they’re still very unfashionable, but they seem to fit better. His hair is different; no longer brown or limp and long, it’s now a vibrant auburn and trimmed short at the sides. His eyes are a startling, soul-searching ice blue that they weren’t before. Andrew wouldn’t even recognise him, if it weren’t for the fact that his stupid handsome face and his awful high cheekbones have been stuck in the trap of Andrew’s eidetic memory for months. He’s retreating down the back stairs of the Leaky Cauldron, which must mean he’s staying in a room there. He also looks ten times more fucking handsome than he did before, and Andrew decides to hate him. 

The boy reaches the bottom of the rickety stairs and begins his way up the street towards them. Andrew can see the exact moment he spots him. They make eye contact, and the boy freezes for a fraction of a second, before continuing his walk as if nothing had happened. To anyone else, it might not have seemed like much of a reaction, but Andrew can see the forced casualness in his gait, the way he’s putting most of his weight on the balls of his feet, like he might need to turn a casual stroll into a run at any moment.

Andrew keeps staring at him.

“Honestly, Andrew, with the way you look at some guys, anyone would think _you’re_ the gay one in our family,” Nicky says, laughing as he catches up. Andrew considers making a joke back, but Nicky is so oblivious that it would doubtless go over his head, so he doesn’t bother. It’s really not that Andrew’s been avoiding coming out: it’s just that every time he says something about it, everyone assumes he’s being sarcastic, and laughs. He’s now given up.

“Ugh, gross,” Aaron grumbles, a pace behind. “You know he just likes staring people down to intimidate them, anyway.”

“Can you guys please hurry up?” Kevin interrupts, poking his head out the door again. “They close in two hours!”

“Oh calm down, princess Kevin,” Nicky says, rolling his eyes, and pushes past Andrew to enter the shop. “Come on then, boys.”

In that moment, Andrew makes an executive decision, and dumps his ice cream cone all over the ground.

“Whoops,” he says, deadpan, as Kevin lets out a groan to the heavens. “Look at clumsy old me. I’d better go and get another one. I’ll meet you back here.”

“The _lengths_ you will go to just to avoid Quidditch stuff,” Aaron mumbles as he pushes past too, and they all head into the shop, but Andrew, instead of turning back towards Florean’s, makes a decisive path right over to the boy.

He’s almost caught up to them anyway, but seems to be caught a few paces away, his eyes on the broomsticks in the window of QQS. Another sports idiot, then. Ugh.

“Well, aren’t you quite the sight,” Andrew drawls, drawing level with the boy and watching his shoulders tense just a little under the line of his ugly orange t-shirt. He’s only a few inches taller than Andrew this close up, but those few inches make Andrew despise him anyway. “A rather _different_ sight that you were a few months ago, that is.”

And, tense as he might be, the guy turns to face Andrew without any hint of fear on his face.

“Life’s changed a lot since May,” he remarks, casual as anything. He glances up and down Andrew like he’s assessing a threat, and then adds, “I used to have something to run away from, but I don’t anymore. I mean, I’m sure you heard about that big Death Eater bust in June.”

Andrew puts several pieces together in his mind in the space of a second, and sneers, “Don’t tell me you’re a Death Eater’s kid.”

“Okay,” says the boy, and then doesn’t say anything else.

Andrew takes this to mean he is a Death Eater’s kid. Under the entire list of theories Andrew had been unable to help himself developing in the last two months, that had never been one which crosses the list. It half makes his skin crawl, but it also leaves something about the boy’s relaxed posture and ugly muggle clothes oddly reassuring –– almost _impressive,_ which is a word Andrew hates and refuses to feel.

“Well,” he mocks, “I’m a halfblood –– are you going to try to kill me?”

But the boy just says, “I’m a halfblood too. Are you going to try and kill _me?”_

Andrew doesn’t know how to respond to this. He refuses to admit that he doesn’t know how to respond to this, so he just crosses his arms over his chest and stares. Maybe he’s trying to accentuate the threat of the wand sticking out of his waistband, or maybe he’s trying to show off his biceps, bared by his muscle tee, as they flex against his fists. He hates himself for the second option so decides to assume it’s the first.

“Do you have my lighter?” the kid asks next.

“Not on me,” Andrew lies flatly. He doesn’t know why he lies and he regrets it the moment later; the lighter is, in fact, tucked away in the pocket of his jeans at just that moment, and he should be leaping for the chance to give the annoying thing back to its owner. But. He doesn’t. 

“Okay. I’ll get it next time I see you. I’m Neil, by the way.” The guy holds out a hand like Andrew might actually deign to a handshake. Andrew just stares at him flatly.

“I don’t care,” he says. “We won’t see each other again.”

“Oh, I don’t know if that’s true,” _Neil_ says, and some sort of infuriating look enters his eyes. He gives a little wave with his rejected hand, and then sets off on his way down the street again –– but, before he can fully disappear, he calls over the unfairly appealing line of his slim shoulder, “I just got a letter from Headmaster Whittier. I’m coming to Hogwarts for seventh year.”

Andrew hates him. He can’t believe he threw a perfectly good ice cream on the floor for _this_ conversation. He waits until Neil has turned out of sight down the street before heading back to Florean’s to buy another one –– and he tells himself it’s still just the heat of the summer sun that he needs to cool down from.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and there's the first three months! the next chapter will be up tomorrow. this was also my first eeeever fic for this fandom so pls let me know your thoughts in the comments, especially on characterisation, it would mean a lot!!!
> 
> you can find my not-super-active aftg tumblr at [acerenee](https://acerenee.tumblr.com) or my regular one at [milominderbindered](https://milominderbindered.tumblr.com)


	2. chapter two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter includes a scene i literally wrote in 2018, in case anyone wanted to know what my general work speed is like

**AUGUST**

August drags on for a thousand years of boring work and ice cream and sticky heat and the uncovered sort of sun which leaves Andrew’s nose irritatingly pink. He would never admit to wanting to go back to Hogwarts, but by the end of the month, he can’t help thinking it’s got to be better than  _ this,  _ even if the sight of the castle in the distance from the window of their Hogsmeade flat does nothing but make his stomach clench unpleasantly.

Nicky still hasn’t finished unpacking in the flat, even though they’ve been there almost two months and there are several simple charms which can do that sort of thing for you. Andrew’s room is fairly minimalist but at least tidy and fully unpacked; he wrinkles his nose as he dodges a cardboard box in the small corridor and ducks into the kitchen, ignoring the presence of his cousin and yet more boxes in favour of digging some ice cream out of the enchanted icebox.

“Good shift yesterday?” Nicky asks in a trilling voice, pushing a mug of coffee Andrew’s way across the obnoxiously yellow table. He doesn’t comment on Andrew’s choice of breakfast as he emerges with a pint of Drooble’s Bubblegum ice cream. “You didn’t get in ‘til late.”

If Andrew was the sort of person to have conversations with his cousin, his response to that would have been twofold: an unruly customer had, after a few too many firewhiskies, begun waving his wand around and shouting threats, and Andrew had to pin him to the wall with magic and threaten  _ I will sectusempra you and nobody will help you while you bleed out  _ to get him to shut up, and also the pub was getting their weekly liquor delivery which meant handjobs with Roland after work.

The even more surreptitious third reason is that Andrew had begun using the floo in the Leaky Cauldron instead of the perfectly serviceable one in Knockturn Alley. There is no justification for this, really. It feels a little safer, and it’s nice having a short walk in the night air after work to clear his head. It certainly has nothing to do with an irritating Death Eater progeny who happens to be staying there for the summer, or the fact that Andrew has now bumped into him, and had more irritating short conversations with him several more times.

He doesn’t say any of that to Nicky, of course. He just sits down at the table with his ice cream tub, takes a sip of coffee, and levels him with an uninterested look.

Nicky huffs. “You’re no fun,” he says, as if that’s news, before tossing a roll of parchment Andrew’s way from the small stack of post on the table “You have another love letter from Kevin, by the way.”

Andrew takes the letter, picks it up, and drops it onto the floor unopened. Every letter Kevin has written him since term ended has been nearly identical ––  _ how much training have you done, you should be at the national prospect camp with me, don’t waste the summer with no practice, don’t let your broom handling skills get rusty. _ Andrew is always tempted to make a joke about the broom handling he’s been doing with Roland, but he never replies to the letters anyway, so the chance is wasted. He has no intention of wasting his summer on  _ Quidditch  _ when he’s going to be forced to do a gross amount of that when September hits anyway.

While Nicky rolls his eyes and goes to pick up the letter, Andrew steals the copy of the  _ Daily Prophet  _ from the rest of the post, because he knows it annoys Aaron if someone messes up the order of the pages before he reads it. As he goes to pull the sheets apart, he gives a cursory glance to the front page –– and finds himself frozen for a moment, staring at it.

_ RESURGENT DEATH EATERS SENTENCED TO LIFE IN AZKABAN,  _ the headline informs him, and underneath that, six mugshots are lined up. The largest of them, snarling at him from the moving picture, is a startlingly familiar face –– with older eyes and a stronger jaw, maybe, but the same sharp cheekbones and aquiline nose that Andrew would now recognise anywhere.  _ Nathan Wesninski, confirmed leader of the group, will receive the dementor’s kiss,  _ the Prophet tells him _. _

Well. Apparently Neil wasn’t lying about his parents.

“Isn’t it great?” Nicky says, peering over Andrew’s shoulder and misinterpreting his silence. “That they’ve been caught, I mean. I can’t believe there are still  _ awful  _ groups like that out there. As if we haven’t proved a million times by now that heritage has nothing to do with magic!”

It’s easy for Nicky to say –– he’s a pureblood, unlike the twins. But at least he doesn’t share the same traditional values as his parents. The Hemmicks are certainly nowhere near Death Eaters, but Andrew still remembers the way his aunt and uncle looked at him when they found out he’d been raised in the muggle world; he’s been tempted to kill them on the spot just to show them how magical he could  _ really  _ be.

“Don’t get too comfortable. It’s not like nobody’s ever broken out of Azkaban before,” Andrew says dully, and goes back to shuffling up the newspaper pages out of order. He shoves the front page into the middle of the bunch, so he doesn’t have to look at that disturbingly familiar face again.

**SEPTEMBER**

Since they now live in Hogsmeade, for the first year ever, Andrew and Aaron don’t have to get the Hogwarts express to school. If Andrew was the sort to care about anything sentimental, he’s sure it would feel like a startling break in tradition, especially since it’s their final year –– but for Andrew, it’s really more of a relief. He doesn’t have to waste a whole day getting motion-sick on a rickety train and dealing with annoying first years trying to sit in his carriage. He can take his time packing, dodge Nicky’s tearful goodbye, make an extra stop at Honeydukes to stock up on chocolate frogs, and still be in plenty of time to wander up the path, Aaron marching a few annoyed steps in front of him, and catch the carriages from Hogsmeade station up to the castle in the evening.

Seeing the floods of babbling students coming off the train only serves to get on Andrew’s nerves, but he stands there waiting until he sees Kevin, a head taller than all the students around him, marching across the platform.

“You didn’t respond to any of my letters while I was at training camp,” is the first thing he says to Andrew. “Have you at least been practicing flying?”

Andrew reaches up to flick Kevin hard on the cheek, turns around without responding, and starts heading off to the carriages.

He finds one at the end of the row and ushers Kevin and then Aaron into it, but the relentless shouts and giggles and shoulder-bumps from the crowds of students are setting an uncomfortable itch under Andrew’s skin already, not to mention the ever-unsettling sight of the thestrals nobody else can notice. He needs a cigarette before he can even think about heading up to the feast. He shakes one out of the pocket of his robes and lights it with the tip of his wand, taking a couple of steps away from the carriage towards the treeline, out of the flow of the crowd, and breathes in the smoke for a couple of long moments.

When the nicotine has calmed him down some and most of the other students seem to have found their way into carriages, Andrew turns around to head in with Kevin and Aaron –– and, just his bad luck, sees Neil bloody Josten stood right in front of their carriage, wearing an ill-fitting school uniform with his shirt untucked and his robes hanging off one shoulder, nose-to-nose with a thestral.

“Can you see them too?” Andrew taunts, flicking the end of his cigarette into the undergrowth and sticking his hands deep in the pockets of his robes before he comes to stand by Neil’s side. He’s expecting Neil to not know what he’s talking about, or make some comment on the carriages — it’s not like he thinks Neil can  _ really _ see the things. But then, Neil says —

“What, the big skeleton horse stood right in front of us? Not many people could miss that.”

Ah, thinks Andrew, and his brain catches unsatisfyingly on the sound. So, Neil doesn’t know what thestrals are — which means he’s not gone through the standard curriculum of magical education, and also that Neil has seen somebody die. Since Neil doesn’t know about thestrals, he just gave that secret away without realising it, chipped off a piece of his armour into Andrew’s waiting hands.

But he didn’t know he was doing it, so it’s not an even trade. That irritates Andrew, and then it irritates him that it irritates him. To get his mind off it, he strays closer to Neil and taunts, “What are you even doing up here, little lost boy? Don’t want to get the boats with the rest of the first years?”

It is, after all, Neil’s first year. 

“Oh, I thought I was,” Neil retorts, affecting surprise. “I guess I mistook you for one of the eleven year olds, since you’re as short as most of them.”

A muscle twitches in Andrew’s cheek. Hopefully to anyone watching it comes off as anger; he refuses to admit that he’s amused by Neil’s sharp tongue.

“Get in the damn carriage,” he finally says, and he and Neil look away from the thestrals at the same time.

Andrew ushers Neil in first, but then immediately joins him, settling next to Kevin on the cramped leather bench. This has the unfortunate face of placing him directly opposite Neil and having to look at his obnoxious cheekbones.

“Uh,” says Aaron, who is glancing between Neil and Andrew, just as Neil is glancing between  _ Aaron  _ and Andrew, and Kevin is just blinking in confusion all around. “Who the fuck is this?"

“This is Neil,” Andrew says blankly. “Obviously.”

“Who the fuck is  _ Neil?” _

“Who the fuck are  _ you?”  _ Neil retorts. “I didn’t know Andrew had a less-interesting clone.”

Andrew tries not to focus on the implication that Neil finds him interesting.

“Are you from another school?” Kevin asks suspiciously. “Are you on their Quidditch team? Is there some sort of tournament going on?”   
  
“No.” Neil has a practiced sort of blank look on his face. “I’m just transferring for seventh year. I didn’t have a traditional education before now.”

“But how do you know  _ Andrew?”  _ Aaron repeats, clearly unable to let it go.

“He stole my most precious possession and still hasn’t given it back,” Neil says wryly.

Andrew snorts, despite himself. He does have Neil’s lighter still tucked away in his trunk. Every time they bumped into each other in Diagon over the summer, Neil asked for it, and Andrew always said he’d left it at home. Neil hasn’t acted particularly distressed about losing it yet, so Andrew’s still figuring out what he might be able to barter for the return of the lighter. Plus –– well. He can’t justify it, but the thing is pretty cool, and he’s quite enjoying holding onto it.

“That does sound like Andrew,” Kevin agrees, although he’s still eyeing Neil suspiciously. 

“How about you all shut up?” Andrew suggests.

“What the  _ fuck?”  _ Aaron asks one last time, but everyone ignores him. Across the carriage, Neil meets Andrew’s eyes, and raises one eyebrow. Andrew looks away.

Professor Dobson is waiting in the entrance hall to greet the first years, who’ll arrive from their boats a bit later than the rest of the students. Usually everyone else just files straight to the Great Hall, but as Andrew’s lot walk in, Bee beckons them over. Kevin and Aaron don’t spot her and keep heading onto the feast, but even though his head of house isn’t actually looking at him, for once, Andrew follows along with Neil, hovering behind his shoulder.

“You must be Neil Wesninski,” Bee says. “We’ve never had a late year transfer like this before, so the headmaster asked me to give you the choice of being sorted at the feast with the first years, or in a private room beforehand.”

“Private, please,” Neil says, sounding relieved. “And, uh –– I legally changed my name after the trial, by the way. So just Neil Josten is fine.”

“Oh, of course. I’ll update that on the records,” Bee says, pulling her wand out of her neat bun and waving it; the long sheet of parchment floating beside her elbow, automatically checking off all the students’ names as they arrive, shifts a few letters around. “Well, wonderful. If you just head to the antechamber beside the Great Hall right now, someone will bring the sorting hat to you before the first years arrive. Perhaps Andrew can show you the way?”

Andrew levels her with a glare, unhappy with being volunteered for a task, but admittedly was planning on sticking by Neil anyway. He can’t quite explain why he’s taken this much interest in Neil –– it’s all swirling around uncomfortably in his head. He’s irritatingly attracted to Neil, remarkably intrigued by his mysterious past and snappy wit, and also still doesn’t trust him as far as he could throw him. Andrew needs to make sure nobody at this school is a threat to Aaron or Kevin. He also sort of wants to look at Neil’s ass in his too-small black school trousers. It’s an awful situation, and it’s only their first day back.

“This way,” Andrew says, crooking a finger at him and heading off.

“I hope you had a good summer, Andrew!” Professor Bee calls after him as he leaves. She might be the only professor he can stand, but Andrew ignores her in that moment, still annoyed at being offered up to the chopping block of being Neil Josten’s tour guide.

While Neil is sorted in the small waiting chamber, Andrew waits outside the door, leaning grumpily against the wall with his arms crossed. He doesn’t like that Aaron and Kevin have headed into the feast without him, even though he wouldn’t be sitting with either of them anyway and certainly isn’t keen to reunite with any of the other Hufflepuffs. He does, much as he’s loath to admit it, like being the first one to see Neil as he emerges from the room, sporting a Slytherin tie and a wry look.

“It was my father’s house,” Neil says, plucking at the tie distastefully with two long fingers. “Go figure.”

“Yeah, it was my favourite Honeydukes cashier’s house too, you’re not special,” Andrew tells him. “Come on.”

He leads Neil to the Great Hall before the professor following him out of the room can do it. All the other students have settled down at their tables, chattering over empty plates as they impatiently wait for the first years to arrive and the feast to begin. Andrew glances over to see Kevin arguing with Allison and Renee at the end of the Slytherin table, and then down at his own table, an obnoxious sea of yellow.

Through gritted teeth, he says to Neil, “I’m two tables over from you.” He’s really not sure why he says this at all. “Usually we all eat together regardless, but they make you sit with your house at the official feasts. When you go over to Slytherin, sit with Kevin. I’m sure you two junkies can keep each other occupied with Quidditch talk all night.”

“Alright,” says Neil. He turns to Andrew, and, for the first time in a while, actually meets his eyes. His gaze is startlingly blue and Andrew’s heart jumps in a way he’s completely unaccustomed to. Andrew’s attraction is usually a dull thing, the same way everything he feels is dull, but fucking Neil Josten has to go and be so  _ completely  _ his type –– it’s horribly unfair of him, especially when he’s giving Andrew an assessing, almost appreciative sort of look. “Well, thanks for being my tour guide. I guess I’ll see you after the feast?”

“I’d be happy to never see you again,” Andrew snips, because it’s the only way to keep himself from saying  _ would you like me to suck your dick in a broom cupboard at the first possible opportunity.  _ Unfortunately, Neil just seems amused, and gives Andrew a little wave as he heads off to sit down.

Andrew stomps his way to the Hufflepuff table, ignores Matt Boyd’s attempt at asking him how his summer was, and digs a liquorice wand out of his pocket to chew on while they wait for dinner. Seventh year is going to be infuriatingly awful –– he can tell already.

It doesn’t occur to him until halfway through the feast that he has made a terrible mistake by connecting Neil and Kevin. He watches from across the room as they spend the first half of dinner in some sort of heated argument, and then the second half with their heads bent together intensely, clearly talking about Quidditch in the way only boring fanatics can do. The second-to-last thing Andrew needs is Kevin making a new friend to drag around with them all the time, and the  _ last  _ thing he needs is that person to be a gorgeous, interesting, irritating Quidditch fan.

Tryouts for the house team aren’t until the first week of October, but at the end of the feast that night, Kevin corners Andrew on their walk down to the dungeons and says, “Neil’s going to come and watch our night practices this month. He needs to work on his understanding of strategy.”

“Who said I’m going to practice with you again this year?” Andrew snips, but they both know he will. It’s part of the deal they made years ago –– all the way through Hogwarts. So Kevin just glares at him, and Andrew glares back, as they reach the dungeon corridor where the Hufflepuffs and Slytherins diverge. “Well, we’re not starting tonight. He can come and watch tomorrow if he’s so fucking desperate.”

Neil, of course, is walking only a pace behind them, and grins. “Night, Andrew,” he says, as they walk away from each other.

* * *

Although Andrew would never admit it, it’s weird being back at school without Nicky. Being in different houses from Aaron and Kevin means Andrew can’t keep an eye on them as much as he’d like, and Nicky being in Hufflepuff too had always somehow been a bit of a comfort –– that no matter how annoying he was, Andrew at least had  _ one  _ member of his ramshackle little family kept close under his wing. But now Nicky’s off being a grown-up, and Andrew’s alone in the Hufflepuff dorms, suffering his irritatingly cheery roommates. At least at NEWT level their classes aren’t separated by house –– but the only class he shares with Aaron and Kevin is Potions, which is only a few hours a week. 

He does, on the other hand, share both Transfiguration  _ and  _ Defence Against the Dark Arts with Neil. They sit next to each other in both. It’s no big deal. The class sizes are small. Andrew tries not to speak to him, or to notice just how good Neil is at practical magic, and how terrible he is at studying in any other way.

So Andrew dozes his way through classes and meals and tries to spend as little time as possible in his common room, which means that for the first few weeks of September, nightly Quidditch practice is the only stand-out event in his life.

The first time Kevin suggested sneaking out to use the pitch at night, three years ago now, Andrew had agreed solely because he was so amused by goody-two-shoes Kevin suggesting they break a rule. By now, the novelty of that has long worn off, and Andrew usually spends the practices refusing to participate, either hovering unresponsively on his broom by the goalposts or just sitting in the stands with a cigarette while Kevin practices quaffle drills alone. 

Except now, Andrew isn’t sitting by himself. Every night since the first of September, Neil Josten has stayed up late and snuck out of the castle with them, just to sit in the stands and watch Kevin fly.

Andrew usually sits a few seats away from him and refuses to talk, but the hours spent in close proximity to Neil, practically alone but for the shadow of Kevin zooming around above them, is taking a reluctant toll on him. Sometimes, Neil looks sideways, his pale eyes almost silver in the moonlight, and asks Andrew breathless questions about Quidditch. Sometimes he asks him about classes or his family, too, and doesn’t seem particularly bothered when Andrew refuses to discuss anything interesting. Sometimes he climbs over the back of his seat about halfway through the night and sits beside Andrew just to steal his cigarette away from him. It’s infuriating and Andrew doesn’t know why he keeps letting Neil do it. Well, he does know. He’s too gay for his own damn good.

Three weeks into the year, Neil finally asks, “So why do you come out here just to watch Kevin?”

This faintly surprises Andrew; he’d assumed Kevin had relayed every detail of their deal already, given how much he and Neil seem to be chatting these days. Then again, their conversations do solely seem to be about broom specs and obscure penalties. Maybe they haven’t got into the personal side of anything yet.

“I’m not just watching him. He’s trying to ‘train’ me, and I’m refusing to participate,” Andrew says. “But he never fucking gives up.”

“But you’re in another house. Isn’t that just him helping you beat us?” Neil asks, startled. Andrew rolls his eyes. Neil’s missing the point, as usual.

“Kevin’s Quidditch boner goes far beyond the Hogwarts league. You know last year he was the youngest player ever to be included in the World Cup, right? He doesn’t think the rest of Hufflepuff is enough of a threat to  _ his _ team to matter, even if I shut down the hoops.”

“So why is he training you?”

“ _ Trying  _ to train me. I’m not letting him,” Andrew corrects, but, well — with a bad taste in his mouth, he finds himself adding, “Kevin wants me to go pro after graduation. He thinks I could be on the national team with him for the next World Cup. That’s far more important to him than the kiddie leagues.”

Understanding washes over Neil’s face and lights a spark in his eyes; his lips part slightly, and Andrew’s traitorous stomach flips over.

He should really be expecting it when the next thing Neil says, sounding half wild with desperation, is, “Can I train with you guys, too? Instead of just watching, I mean?”

An unpleasant taste fills Andrew’s mouth. He doesn’t respond, but he doesn’t have to, because Kevin is sweeping through the sky towards them a moment later, bobbing on his broom a couple feet away from the stands. “Are you coming or not, Andrew?” he calls over, snappish and irritated. “I’m sick of watching you just sit around.”

_ Well _ , thinks Andrew, and shoves Neil’s shoulder forwards like a sacrificial lamb. “Why do you need me when you’ve got another pathetic junkie right here?”

“Neil can’t even fly, he just likes Quidditch theory,” Kevin snaps back. Andrew glances at Neil, and somehow doesn’t feel like that’s the whole truth. Interesting. Kevin and Neil haven’t just been too busy talking about Quidditch to get into the personal stuff –– it sounds like Neil’s actively hiding his past. Andrew wonders if he’s the only one who knows about Neil’s runaway past and has connected him to his Death Eater father, too.

“I could try,” Neil offers. Andrew would have to be deaf to miss the desperate undercurrent of his voice.

Kevin eyes him for a moment, and then sighs. “Fine. Go down to the broom shed and get a school broom. You’ll be a body for me to practice maneuvers around, at least. Do a couple laps first to show me what you’ve got.”

Neil goes instantly, abandoning his ugly woollen jumper on the chair beside Andrew and hurrying down the stairs of the stands. Andrew spitefully flicks ash onto it as he lights up a new cigarette, and hunches further down in his chair to watch the pair of them.

And.  _ Fuck.  _ Even on a rickety school broom, out of practice for who knows how many years, it turns out Neil is…  _ good.  _

“I think he flies faster than the seeker on the national team,” Kevin whispers beside Andrew, breathless, his eyes fixed on Neil’s blurry form as he circles the hoops. “ _ Fuck _ . Imagine what we could do with him.”

“Put your boner away,” Andrew says. “It’s time to go inside, anyway. We have Transfiguration at fucking eight thirty tomorrow.” 

But he can’t help it. Andrew’s hopeless, and he hates himself –– but he’s watching Neil fly, too.

**OCTOBER**

It’s the first week of October, they’re gearing up for Quidditch tryouts, and Andrew has no idea how Neil Josten has become embedded in his life so fast. 

He’s an absolute nuisance -- an  _ obsessive  _ nuisance, who keeps finding Andrew at all hours of the day to ask him about random things from the Hogwarts Quidditch seasons of the last few years, or just dumb homework questions for Defence, or seemingly random things about what spells Andrew would use in obscure survival situations. He asks if he can borrow Andrew's broom at night practice, since Andrew never uses it and the school brooms are shit, but Andrew says no just to be petty. It doesn’t seem to matter. Neil’s outpacing all the other house seekers on a shoddy Cleansweep already. He keeps raising his eyebrow at Andrew as if he sees through Andrew’s snippy replies and Andrew hates it, because he’s never been able to raise just one eyebrow, and it’s extremely unfair that Neil can. 

Unfortunately, Andrew can’t really blame anyone but himself for Neil constantly being around. Kevin’s the quidditch lure, sure, but Andrew’s the one who told Neil to sit with them at mealtimes each day, who keeps seeking him out between classes just for someone to bother, who can’t stop wondering, curious in a way he never usually is, what the Slytherin dorms are like, and how Neil looks laying on dark green sheets at night…

But there’s nothing productive to come of that, so Andrew focuses on the annoyance of it all.

He’s particularly annoying one afternoon as they sit in the quiet back of the student commons together, ostensibly working on a paired essay project about dark creatures for Defence Against the Dark Arts. Of course, Neil seems to have a terrible lack of worth ethic and self discipline for anything that isn’t practical, so instead of contributing to their essays, he’s sat there babbling along about his course load.

“––And I’m still kind of bummed I couldn’t take Divination,” he says, bobbing his quill up and down between two fingers, not seeming to notice that tiny droplets of ink are splattering all over their work whenever he does it. “But I had to take these ‘prior knowledge’ tests, you know, to prove my aptitude for stuff since I didn’t take OWLs, and I didn’t make that one at NEWT level. I didn’t think that’d be the sort of thing you have to  _ study  _ for, but I guess it is.”

“There’s no point studying for it at all. Divination is complete bullshit,” Andrew says, scratching a few more words down onto their essay. Neil pauses, looking at him for a long moment across the desk, and then flicks his quill forwards Andrew. The soft end of the feather brushes Andrew’s knuckles, and he goes stone still.

“Let’s trade,” Neil finally says, a demand more than a question. “Tell me why you think that and I’ll tell you why I disagree.”

Andrew hates himself for doing this, but they’re the only ones in the Commons, and the soft end of Neil’s quill is still brushing Andrew’s hand, and, to his credit, Neil hasn’t talked about Quidditch in at  _ least  _ an hour, so he should get a reward for being mildly interesting. Andrew sets down his own quill, and crosses his arms across his chest.

“Aaron was raised by his mother, but she put me into muggle foster care the moment I was born, because a seer predicted her firstborn twin was going to be a squib. She was a pureblood, and she thought it would  _ give it away  _ that the guy she’d been fucking was a muggle if the kids weren’t magic. But surprise surprise, here I am at Hogwarts, with the best grades in practical defence magic for three generations.”

It’s a shocking truth to most people who hear it, even if it doesn’t touch on the grimmest parts of Andrew’s childhood or experiences. But Neil just accepts it, completely easily. He asks no follow-up questions, and doesn’t even raise his stupid single eyebrow in surprise. He just stares across the table, meeting Andrew’s eyes steadily. 

“My mum was a seer,” Neil says. “It's how she knew when my dad found out she was secretly a muggleborn, and when he wanted to kill me, and when it was time to move on, on the run.”

“And yet she’s dead,” Andrew taunts. “Did she see that coming too?”

He’s trying to antagonise, but Neil doesn’t look too bothered. Yet another puzzle piece. Insulting his dead mother is always the most surefire way to get  _ Aaron _ worked up.

* * *

  
  


Andrew goes to Hufflepuff tryouts the next day, but Matt doesn’t make him actually do anything beyond hover in the hoops to deter their potential chasers –– nobody’s under the illusion that anybody’s going to make a better keeper than him, so they’re not advertising that position. Almost all of the team had graduated the year before with Nicky, though, so they’re trying to fill five whole positions. A dull gaggle of young students turn up, half of whom can’t even seem to keep their broomsticks the right way up. 

Matt’s a good chaser and Andrew can usually shut down their goalposts when he tries, but he’s not buoyed by their chances as he watches the bumbling mess of new prospects. Most of them are no older than third year and at least half appear to only be there on a dare; less than four of them even manage to throw a quaffle far enough for Andrew to have to bother swatting it away. Their lone applicant for the seeker position falls off her broom two feet off the ground. 

It’s a grim, drizzly October day, and Andrew’s hair is sticking uncomfortably to his scalp within minutes, but the process drags on all morning. When Matt finally shoots up a flurry of yellow sparks from his wands to summon everyone back to the ground, ten people land all at once and send droplets of mud splattering all over the lot of them. Andrew is cold and seethingly annoyed by the time they finish. He rubs the mud off his face in the changing rooms and bundles himself up in several black hoodies before stomping away without speaking to anyone.

With no desire to do any homework on a Saturday and the itch of a foul mood under his skin, Andrew heads right to the kitchens afterwards. He requests hot chocolate from one of the house elves and takes the whole mug with him back out, snagging a muffin as well.

If you’re looking for alone time at Hogwarts, there are plenty of bizarre nooks and crannies which most people would never stumble upon, but most of them aren’t  _ comfy.  _ So Andrew felt particularly pleased back in third year when he was heading back from the kitchens and accidentally took a wrong turn that led him to a small, disused room full of sofas and an eternally crackling fireplace. It seems like it used to be an office that got turned into storage, or maybe an old prefects’ lounge –– but whatever it was, Andrew has now firmly claimed it as his own. He stretches out along the particularly plush sofa beside the fireplace, takes a sip of foamy hot chocolate, and pulls a book out of his bag to distract himself with.

Hogwarts has always been strange for Andrew. The arrival of his letter, back in the summer he was eleven, had felt more magical than anything they’d ever learned at school –– it was an impossible escape, an excuse to leave behind the worst foster family he’d ever had. He’d already been trained out of  _ hoping  _ for things by then, but in the deepest parts of his mind, he’d maybe hoped magic was going to be the thing that saved his life. Then he turned up on the train on day one and found himself staring at a face just like his own. Things got more complicated, after that.

Even apart from all the family bullshit, school was just weird. Andrew liked to spend about 98% more of his time alone than was ever possible at boarding school. He would never feel comfortable sleeping in a room with other people, and here he had to share with four other guys he’d still not really begun to trust. None of the lessons had ever given him the excitement or sense of purpose he’d secretly hoped they would when he was eleven; he was told he was exceptional at Defence Against the Dark Arts, but Andrew knew it was actually the Dark Arts themselves he was better at, and he was told he was exceptional at Quidditch, but it was equal parts terrifying and boring and he wished he didn’t have the talent at all. Most of Hogwarts had been a relentless slog through uncomfortable situations and a fight against his own internal world.

So why, then, did the thought that this was his last year fill him with such an odd sense of dread? Andrew’s eyes flickered up from the pages of his book and glanced distractedly around the room he was in. It was certainly nothing special, a dusty stone room with three chintz sofas and an old desk pushed against a wall. But there was something to it being  _ his.  _ A place where he’d made memories, or perhaps a comforting  _ lack  _ of memories. He didn’t even know where he’d be living this time next year –– still with Nicky and Aaron? Or would Nicky be off with his boyfriend by then. Aaron apprenticing at Mungo’s and uninterested in his brother? Would Kevin force Andrew to get a place with him so he could hound him about Quidditch all damn day? Would Andrew just give in and join Kevin’s team? He had no clue, but he also didn’t know what he’d be doing if he  _ didn’t  _ do that. Part of him wished he could just stay in this abandoned sofa-room forever.

Ugh. These sorts of thoughts are the exact reason Andrew isn’t letting himself think about the future. He chugs the rest of his hot chocolate in one go and refocuses on his book, but it doesn’t really work. Uncomfortable grumpiness follows him around for the rest of the day.

* * *

  
The next morning, Andrew is at the Hufflepuff table dribbling a whole pot of honey on top of his pancakes when Neil Josten thumps onto the bench beside him, breathless with ruffled hair and his tie messily undone around his neck. Andrew’s whole body flushes instantly.

“I got seeker,” Neil says, his eyes wide and gleaming and staring  _ right  _ at Andrew, just a couple inches away. “I can’t believe it, there were so many other people trying out, Andrew –– I actually  _ got it.” _

His mouth doesn’t close all the way even when he’s done speaking, his red lips popped open like he’s designed solely to frustrate Andrew out of his own skin.

“Are we surprised by this?” Andrew asks, particularly snippy to make up for the way he’s having to clench the pot of honey so tight it almost shatters just to resist reaching for Neil’s face instead. “The team captain has been training you himself for the better part of a month. He looks like he’s about to spontaneously orgasm every time you do a sloth roll.”

Neil flounders over that statement for a moment, and then wrinkles his nose a bit. He sounds rather distasteful, and perhaps a little flustered, as he says, “Do you always have to compare Quidditch to ––  _ sex  _ stuff _?” _

It is not at all what Andrew expected him to say. He finds himself actually unsure what path this conversation is headed down for a moment, a situation he rarely finds himself in with the mind numbingly rote interactions of his usual daily life. Neil really does get curiouser and curiouser.

Keeping a close eye on Neil’s face for his reaction, Andrew casually replies, “I would have thought a junkie like you would be all about that. Don’t you go and hump your broomstick after every practice?”   
  
“ _ Andrew.” _ Neil is no longer meeting Andrew’s eyes, instead dropping a slice of brown toast onto the plate in front of him and then beginning to open a banana. After a couple of odd quiet seconds, he adds, “Quidditch is way more interesting than sex, anyway. I don’t get why everyone goes on about it.”

Andrew’s stomach clenches, and he turns his gaze back to his own pancakes. For a moment, Andrew wonders if maybe Neil has some sort of past similar to his own, but stabs the thought down before he can linger on it too long. Neil’s given him no real reason to think that. All he’s given is one hellishly ambiguous statement, but it says everything that Andrew, with his ironclad boundaries, needs to know. Neil is not interested in sex. He seems unhappy to even talk about it. Andrew will not push that topic again.

Andrew stabs a bit of pancake with his fork and shoves it into his mouth. He’s  _ not  _ disappointed, he tells himself. It’s not like he’d been –– holding out  _ hopes  _ for anything with Neil. Andrew only does casual sex with heavily vetted guys. He doesn’t do anything with anyone he has to spend any regular amount of time with, because he doesn’t want a relationship, and it would just make things far too awkward. Neil Josten’s handsome damn face and snarky damn tongue don’t change anything about that.

Luckily, he’s spared from talking more about any of it, because Kevin crashes in on Andrew’s side not a moment later.

“I was just telling Andrew I got seeker,” Neil says, immediately back to his breathless excitement. 

Kevin grabs the carafe of coffee and says, “Why? We all knew you were going to. I’ve been training you myself all month.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading guys !! pls drop a comment to win my eternal favour, and i'll see y'all tomorrow for the next chapter


	3. chapter three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i loved writing this chapter so ding dang much

**NOVEMBER**

The first of November brings Slytherin’s first Quidditch match of the year. Andrew has already played a couple –– Hufflepuff went first against Gryffindor and then Ravenclaw, losing to both, thanks mostly to Andrew’s complete lack of interest and their newly ramshackle team of younger students. Matt is pulling his hair out over the whole thing, but he’s the  _ nice  _ sort of captain who won’t yell at any of the kids to get their asses moving, so Andrew doesn’t predict Hufflepuff’s chances improving much.

Slytherin, on the other hand, as the cup winners of the previous year and the adored  _ Kevin Day’s  _ team, have more than a few expectations put upon them. Andrew watches disinterestedly as Kevin kicks into stress mode, becoming even more terse and single-minded than usual. Neil seems mostly irritated by Kevin’s new attitude, but he’s just as focused, spending twice as much time on the pitch and doodling little snitches in the margins of his notes in the classes he shares with Andrew. It’s all very dull to observe.

The morning of the match, Neil and Kevin sit with the other members of the Slytherin team at breakfast –– Allison and Renee and a handful of younger students whose names Andrew has no interest in learning. Andrew sits down at the Hufflepuff table alone and starts looking for the sugariest breakfast food available, deliberately not letting his eyes stray across the room.

A moment later, Matt slides into the chair beside him. “Thought someone might have kidnapped you when you weren’t in the dorm when I woke up. You never get up this early on the weekends.”

Andrew shoots an unamused look Matt’s way, but otherwise doesn’t respond. Matt Boyd is probably not the worst roommate it’s possible to have, but Andrew has also spent the last seven years entirely uninterested in becoming friends with him, and Matt still won’t give up on trying to  _ chat.  _ Andrew has no idea why this is. They have nothing in common, Matt hates Andrew’s bad attitude on the Quidditch pitch, and Andrew never engages in these attempts at conversation. Then again, Matt also doesn’t seem to be friends with the other two guys in their dorm –– his girlfriend’s in Gryffindor and he spends a lot more time over at that table than with his own house –– so maybe he’s just always looking for someone to talk to and Andrew is a convenient blank slate.

Andrew remains silent while Matt pours himself some coffee, so Matt carries on, “You going to the match, then? You got odds on Slytherin or Gryffindor? I’ve gotta back Dan, of course ––” He is, sure enough, wearing a Gryffindor scarf and a red beanie with a big yellow bobble on top. He’s probably going to lug down that embarrassing poster board with  _ I <3 CAPTAIN WILDS  _ painted on it that he made last year. “But, I mean, they  _ are  _ playing against Kevin. I guess I’ll just have to hope that new seeker of theirs is no good. I tried to get one of the ickles to go and spy on practice to see how he was doing, but Day has that shit locked down tight. You’ve hung around him a bit, right? D’you know what he’s like?”

Andrew considers this for a moment, tears the edge off the croissant on his plate, and says, “He’s awful. And I’m not going to the match.”

In his entire seven years at Hogwarts, Andrew has not gone to see a single Quidditch match he wasn’t playing in. He has no intention of changing that today. He likes to take his Saturday mornings as a chance to sleep in, have the dorm to himself, and ignore the rest of the world. The fact that he’s up early enough to make the match today is purely coincidence. He has no reason to go.

* * *

Andrew goes to the match. Does he hate himself for it? Yes. Does he feel more out of control of his own choices than he has in years? Also yes.

The weather is frigid and unpleasant and Andrew’s glaring at everything as he sits in the stands, bundled up in several jumpers and coats with his arms crossed over his chest, the tips of his ears freezing. Luckily, it’s a short match. Neil catches the snitch within half an hour, and is immediately mobbed by the cheering bodies of the rest of the Slytherin team.

Awful. Absolutely awful. Especially the way Neil’s cheeks are all pink with exertion and his hair is ruffled from the wind and how he’s grinning, wide and surprised and nearly manic with happiness, and how as soon as he escapes his gaggle of teammates, his eyes go to the stands, and look right at Andrew.

* * *

Neil’s success on the team doesn’t mean Kevin is done giving him extra training. It seems, in fact, to mean the opposite. Kevin doesn’t say it outloud, and in fact is so snappish that Neil seems to think Kevin’s on the brink of kicking him back  _ off  _ the team any day now, but Andrew knows how to read Kevin’s ridiculous moods: this is Kevin seeing potential in someone for something bigger than the trivial affairs of school sports. Kevin’s eyeing Neil up for the pro leagues, too.

So Neil keeps on coming to night practices, and Andrew keeps refusing to participate, though the lure of it gets reluctantly stronger and stronger as he spends each night sitting in the stands, teeth gritted against the unpleasant sensation of being so high up anyway, watching Neil zoom around with his hair ruffled. Neil’s face is usually blank and hard to amuse, but as soon as he gets in the air he starts giving out smiles left and right. Andrew wouldn’t mind seeing some of those smiles closer up, but he also  _ would  _ mind it, because the things it would do to his stomach would mean he would have to kill Neil on the spot.

Tonight, instead of giving in to his traitorous interest, Andrew stays in the stands, a beanie pulled down over his ears and his wand in his lap so that he can cast repeated warming charms on himself whenever the wintery night air threatens to encroach too close to him. 

In the middle of the pitch, high enough off the ground to be level with Andrew, Kevin is teaching Neil how to dodge a series of floating dummies meant to represent an opposing team’s chasers. A common chaser manoeuvre is the Balinsky Merge, where beaters fly apart and then quickly back together while knocking the bludger between them and trap an opposing player. Neil’s slight build and unparalleled speed make him particularly primed to avoid this, and it only takes a couple of tries for him to master the dodge. Even Kevin, beneath his veneer of captainly sternness, looks impressed.

“Now, how does an idiot like you manage to get that so quick?” Andrew says tauntingly, to avoid saying anything more revealing, as Neil zooms towards him and hovers in the air just beyond the stands. “If you applied yourself to Potions like this, we might not be  _ failing _ our group project.”

“My brain takes a while to pick stuff up, but my body learns fast,” Neil says, shrugging and then dropping sideways, barrel rolling on the broom a couple of times.

The unnecessary display at such a height makes Andrew’s stomach swoop, and so does something else, the way he can’t help but imagine Neil’s words in another context. How fast would his body learn the sorts of things Andrew is interested in?

_ Stupid _ , Andrew thinks to himself viciously, as Neil turns his broom around to fly away.

* * *

The problem, Andrew thinks, is: everything. The problem is how his past affects his present, how it affects the things he wants to do, things his brain wants but his body doesn’t and things his body craves but his brain is terrified of –– it’s all bundled up messily, and in a way Andrew is unqualified to unpack. He has spent some time in therapy during a couple of summer breaks, but it’s impossible to keep that up during the Hogwarts term without… talking to someone  _ else,  _ someone in authority at school, about precisely why he needs therapy, which is just too many bouts of talking for Andrew’s liking. So he’s attempting to do it alone. Whatever  _ it  _ is.

Andrew hates the term  _ recovery _ . There is no recovering; no ‘real him’ that he can somehow uncover or retrieve. His childhood had been irrevocable. What’s left now is to grow from this point, move forwards and try to shape himself in new ways; this is a concept that Andrew, pessimist though he is, finds relentlessly more optimistic than the idea that he has anything he could ‘get better’ from.

Unfortunately, the path towards  _ growth _ is littered with obstacles. A particularly large obstacle on this path has stupid red hair and blue eyes and flicks the tip of his tongue against his bottom lip when he’s being cheeky.

After the sixth time of waking up in the middle of the night from dreams of that tongue, behind the flimsy defence of his four-poster’s curtains in their communal dorm, with the blankets bunched between his legs, his dick so hard it hurts, Andrew is ready to punch something. The best candidate for punching is Neil, but coming into contact with him in any way seems inadvisable. It’s hard to even find a place to jerk off at boarding school when you’ve got as many privacy issues as Andrew has, so Andrew is left full of restless, simmering tension, and with nowhere to put it. 

So rather than punching, he takes a different approach. Andrew is a perceptive guy; he’s noticed the looks that the sixth year Hufflepuff beater, Alfie Morse, has been giving him all term. After practice one day, Andrew lingers, and Morse does, too, halfway through stripping off his quidditch robes. He’s a bit too tall for Andrew’s liking, but his abs are insane –– he’s hot, and he’s there, and he’s interested, glancing up and down Andrew’s own thick muscles with his mouth open.

They make out quick and sloppy and single-minded. Andrew feels up Morse’s abs to his heart’s content, and then blows him, and jerks off on him; the whole thing probably takes less than fifteen minutes. It’s hot and they both orgasm, and afterwards, when Andrew barks at him to get the fuck out, Morse does, without complaint.

So why the fuck isn’t it  _ good?  _ Andrew takes another shower, and glowers at the tiled wall, considers blasting a hole through it with his wand. How has it become that hooking up with a hot guy isn’t satisfying to him? The first time Andrew had managed to get Roland off last year, it had felt like an unmitigated victory, a winning back of his own desires from the clutches of his troubled brain. The first time  _ he  _ managed to get off with Roland in the same room, it had felt even more so. Half a fucking year of knowing Neil Josten, and any sense of victory has been stamped down by the fact that getting off with another dude doesn’t even feel as satisfying as just shutting himself up in the dorm bathroom in the early hours of the morning, keeping completely silent, and jerking off to thoughts of Neil’s grin.

Andrew hates himself, and finds himself in a permanent bad mood. He stamps it down under his usual stoic annoyance, but he doesn’t attempt to hook up with anyone else at school again. Maybe the Christmas break next month will help him reset, he thinks. Maybe he’ll even go and see Roland.

**DECEMBER**

In the second week of December, they’re all –– Andrew, Aaron, Kevin, and  _ Neil ––  _ having breakfast at the Hufflepuff table, per Andrew’s insistence, when a letter arrives from Nicky.

In Andrew’s opinion, it’s thoroughly ridiculous for Nicky to write to them when he lives barely a twenty minute walk away and they can see him almost every weekend if they want to. This is perhaps why his letter is addressed to Aaron.

“He’s just making plans about Christmas,” Aaron explains, after opening the letter and scanning it for a moment.

Andrew, who has his mouth full of croissant and is focusing on not looking at a half-lidded morning-mussed Neil across the table, says, “Did I ask?”

Aaron rolls his eyes, and turns to the marginally more conversational people in their group. “Kevin, you’re going back to your mum’s, right?”

“Yeah.” Kevin nods. His relationship with his mother –– the highest scoring female chaser ever to play on Britain’s national Quidditch team, with no less than five world cups under her belt –– is fraught with expectations, but he at least seems to enjoy her company when he does go back. “It’ll be easier to practice flying on the pitch at home, anyway.”

Then, Aaron does the unthinkable, and says, “What about you, Neil?”

Andrew can’t help but glance up to watch Neil’s reaction, and catches a dark look flashing across his face.

“Oh. Just staying at the castle.”

“What, no family want you back?”

Andrew knows about Neil’s parents, and he knows Kevin does, too. But he doesn’t actually know, yet, whether Aaron has figured out the link between the Death Eaters in the papers so many months ago and their mysterious new student. As far as Andrew knows, Aaron and Neil have never had a proper conversation of any sort. Neil has mentioned several times that he finds Aaron more annoying than a bat bogey hex.

“Well, there’s my uncle,” Neil says, slowly, kind of tentatively. This is the first mention Andrew has ever heard of an uncle, and it stabs him through with an unpleasant  _ annoyed  _ feeling at the fact that he doesn’t know all of Neil’s life. If he has a relative left, why was Neil staying at the Leaky Cauldron all summer? “But it’s kind of complicated, with him being a muggle and all. It’s easier if I just stay at school.”

The way he says it is calculated, slow enough to be almost rehearsed. He could, of course, just be testing out whether mentioning his muggle family in front of the ostensibly pureblood Aaron and definitely pureblood Kevin is going to get him some kind of negative reaction –– that’s probably what Aaron assumes, at least. But Andrew suspects there’s more to the story.

He tells himself it’s wanting to get to the bottom of  _ that  _ mystery, and nothing else, which makes it okay for his mouth to say, without consulting his brain, “Christmas at school is depressing as hell. Just come stay at the Hogsmeade flat, or we’ll never hear the end of it from Nicky.”

In general, Andrew likes to tell people where to go and what to do, but this might technically be the first time he’s… invited someone home. The baffled looks both Aaron and Kevin are giving him suggest that it is. Andrew turns his gaze back to his plate and stoically tears another piece off his croissant, forcing himself to look as uninterested as he feels –– should feel –– whatever.

“Uh, if you’re sure I wouldn’t be in the way,” Neil says, which is politer than mostly anything Andrew’s ever heard him say before.

“You kind of  _ would,”  _ Aaron grumbles, but has the sense to do it under his breath. Admittedly their flat is small as hell, but it does have a servicable sofa. 

Andrew narrows his eyes Aaron’s way. “It will give Kevin someone else to bug when he inevitably gets sick of his mother and comes to force us to play Quidditch.”

“Hey!” Kevin protests. “I don’t  _ bug  _ you guys to play. You just need to keep up your practice over the break.”

Anyway, the damage is done. Andrew just has to get through a couple more weeks of boring classes, one last Quidditch match of the term –– which Hufflepuff, again, loses –– and then it’s time to head back home.

* * *

The Hogsmeade flat is toasty warm and smells like cookies, which  _ must  _ be a charm because Nicky can’t bake for shit, when they open the door. Nicky immediately flings himself around the corner and proclaims, “My  _ babies!  _ My gorgeous baby twins! You’re home and I’ve  _ missed _ you!”

He flings his arms around Aaron in a very one-sided hug, which Aaron stiffly endures, but wisely doesn’t attempt to grab Andrew. Andrew rolls his eyes and glances at Neil, who is wide-eyed and uncomfortable looking in the doorway of the flat.

“Are you going to come in or not?” Andrew says, long-sufferingly, and tugs Neil inside by the loose arm of his too-big jumper before slamming the door behind him.

This gets Nicky to release Aaron, which Aaron looks rather pleased about, although it instantly doubles the terror on Neil’s face when he’s rounded upon.

“And  _ you  _ must be Neil! I can’t believe Andrew’s been holding out on letting me meet you on Hogsmeade weekends. You know you’re the first non-Kevin friend he’s ever brought home, right?”

Andrew once again rolls his eyes. “He’s not my friend and I’m not  _ bringing him home,”  _ Andrew says, shoving past the uncomfortable cluster of bodies in their small corridor and heading towards the kitchen. “He’s a pathetic stray I’m letting sleep on the sofa to avoid a worse fate.”

“I appreciate you too, Andrew,” Neil mumbles sarcastically behind him, but he sounds amused. Andrew’s stomach clenches. He doesn’t think about it.

Dinner that night is the most unpleasant affair of his life. Nicky babbles on and on about how Erik will be joining them tomorrow –– even though he’s graduated from Durmstrang now, Erik still works abroad and is struggling to find the balance between seeing Nicky and being a functional human being at his job, but he’s managed to get a full week off for Christmas. Aaron is bitter and assholish the way he always is when Nicky mentions his boyfriend, and Neil just looks baffled by the whole situation, sitting across from Andrew in the singular spare seat at their tiny yellow kitchen table. He meets Andrew’s eyes over a forkful of mashed potatoes, and their toes accidentally bump together on the floor when Andrew stretches out one leg.

“So,  _ Neil,  _ you’ve hardly told me anything about you!” Nicky eventually says, when he’s done recounting their plans for every single day of the Christmas holidays. “Gimme the top hits, come on, likes and dislikes, family drama, who you’re crushing on, et cetera.”

Neil looks completely bemused. “Uh,” he says, “I like Quidditch a lot.”

This is clearly the end of his sentence, but Nicky sits there in silence for several more moments, as if he’s expecting more.

When it becomes clear that’s not gonna happen, Nicky glances at Andrew and says, “Okayyyy. Have we got another Kevin on our hands or what?”

Andrew snorts. “No, he’s far worse.”

“Hey!” Neil protests, and this time deliberately knocks Andrew’s foot under the table. “I am not. Anyway, Kevin’s just dedicated.”

“A dedicated asshole,” Aaron says. Neil shoots him a nasty look.

“You’re one to talk.”

“Okay!” Nicky quickly interrupts. It’s only in this moment that Andrew finds himself realising just how much their group has been missing a  _ mediator,  _ with Nicky graduated. The rest of them usually either sit in stony silence or argue with each other, all day long. “Okay, well, this is a lovely chat and all, but why don’t we get onto more festive topics, okay? I thought tomorrow we could all decorate the tree together! Uh, the only place I could fit it is shoved beside the sofa, so sorry if the pine needles tickle you while you’re asleep, Neil. Erik says there’s some kind of charm to turn the sofa into a pull-out bed but I haven’t figured that out yet.”

“That’s fine,” Neil assures him. “I can sleep just about anywhere.”

An unsurprising statement from a runaway. Nicky forces conversation through the rest of dinner, and they play a couple of card games, with some alcohol and ice cream as motivation, before they all decide to get an early night.

This is what presents a challenge.

Their little flat is basically just one corridor with three rooms on either side. From the front door, the kitchen is on the right and the living room is on the left. Nicky and Aaron’s rooms follow the kitchen, and Andrew’s room and the bathroom are on the left. Having the buffer of the corridor is usually good for Andrew, who doesn’t like being disturbed by the sounds of other people through the thin walls while he sleeps. But it also means he’s directly next to where Neil is sleeping, now. Andrew’s bed is pushed against the same wall that the sofa is on the other side. As soon as Andrew lays his head down on his pillow, his brain says,  _ you’re three inches away from Neil Josten in bed right now,  _ and his entire body freaks out.

He’s flooded with frustration and half-wild with pent up feeling. Half of it’s physical, an uncomfortable horniness he can’t even deal with for fear that Neil is too alert and might hear the muffled sounds of Andrew jerking off. The other half of it is even worse, because it’s all  _ emotion.  _ His mind won’t stop picturing what Neil would look like if he could just phase through that wall and be laid in Andrew’s bed instead. His red hair fluffed against the pillow, his hot breath on Andrew’s neck, the smell of parchment and broom wax seeping into Andrew’s sheets. Andrew has never managed to sleep with another person in his bed before, but for some reason when he pictures Neil there, it’s alluring rather than terrifying. Neil’s a panicky, hyperactive runaway, but when Andrew imagines him sleeping, his breaths are slow and steady enough to calm Andrew down, too.

He thinks he might be going insane. Inviting Neil here was possibly the worst mistake he’s ever made. How is Andrew supposed to survive two whole weeks of this? He shoves his face into his pillow and resists the urge to scream.

* * *

After three boring days and restless nights and the image of Neil sleeping three inches away from him flooding his dreams, Andrew gives up on sleep. Instead of going to bed after he’s changed into his pyjamas, Andrew puts his coat and boots over the top, grabs his wand and cigarettes, and climbs out his bedroom window onto the roof.

Their flat may be small and kind of shitty and noisy in the day because it’s over a shop, but the benefit to inhabiting the top floor of a building is that he doesn’t have to go trekking up hundreds of flights of stairs just to get to the roof. Like always, the unpleasant clench of fear in Andrew’s stomach at being so high up is almost refreshing; it focuses his mind away from the other things he doesn’t want to think about, and brings a sort of clarity. The horizon is dark beneath the night sky, but he can make out the lights in the buildings closest to them, and the shapes of the mountains in the distance. The stillness of the night, nobody else left awake, is exactly what Andrew needs. He casts a warming charm on his hands and then takes out his cigarettes.

Of course, because he can have no reprieve from anything in his life, that’s when he hears the sound of another window opening beneath him. An obnoxious head of messy red hair pokes out, looks up, spots him, and then retreats inside for a second. A moment later, Neil’s whole body is scrambling out, a hoodie pulled over the  _ Holyhead Harpies  _ t-shirt Andrew now knows he sleeps in. The journey to the roof from the living room window is far more precarious than it is from Andrew’s room, which has a ledge and a trellis outside, and the casual way Neil clambers up makes Andrew’s stomach clench. He looks away, and only glances back when he feels Neil’s weight settling onto the roof beside him, just a few inches away.

“Merlin, it’s freezing up here,” Neil complains. He looks at Andrew’s wand in his lap, but Andrew stubbornly doesn’t offer him a warming charm. Instead, from his pocket, Andrew pulls Neil’s very own lighter, and blatantly lights two cigarettes with it. Neil watches him, an amused curve at the edge of his lips.

“Funny how you never have that thing on you when I ask for it back,” he notes, as he accepts one of the cigarettes and slots it between two fingers, holding it close to his face without taking a drag. Interestingly, he doesn’t ask for the lighter back right then.

“Hilarious,” Andrew agrees, blankly, and then out of nowhere, perhaps because he’s loopy from a lack of sleep or perhaps because everything just feels more honest under the stars, says, “Tell me the truth about why you’re not staying with your uncle for Christmas, and I’ll tell you about my family too.”   
  
It’s an even trade. It has to be. Andrew has no problem taking from people he doesn’t care about, but even though he knows nothing will come of his feelings towards Neil, he can’t stand to make this unbalanced. He can’t stand to be one of those men who just  _ take  _ from the person they –– the person they like, or want, or whatever. Even if Neil has no idea that’s what he is to Andrew, it wouldn’t be fair.

And, luckily, Neil accepts the trade.

“He is a muggle. I wasn’t lying about that.” Neil sighs, and takes another deep breath of cigarette smoke. His eyes look out over the dark skyline of the village, not at Andrew. The way the moonlight plays against his pale irises makes him look like magic itself. “My mother was a muggleborn, but she managed to hide it, almost her whole life. My dad thought she was an orphaned pureblood when he married her, and she used him to secure her status and keep herself safe, I guess. The thing is, my mum wasn’t bothered by the horrible shit my dad was doing, because she was kind of involved in the same stuff in the muggle world. Her whole family is, like, this big crime family. And my uncle does know about magic, now, and he cared about my mum and he cares about me, and he’d look out for me if I went to stay there. But also, I’d just be getting tangled up in yet another big, dangerous drama. And I’ve had enough of that to last me a lifetime. So if I have the choice, I’d rather be on my own, and keep life quiet.” He pauses, slants a glance sideways, and then adds, “Or – well, I guess not on my own, if I have the choice. It’s nice being here with you.”

So Andrew tells him about being Andrew Doe, raised in the muggle foster system, no idea he had a halfblood twin out in the world. Aaron, while at least being raised magical, hadn’t known the  _ brother  _ thing either. It had only come out on the first day of Hogwarts, as they stood in the crowd to be sorted and happened to glance around at their fellow first-years at the same time. Making eye contact with your own face was, admittedly, pretty surprising.

Aaron had freaked out, right there in front of the whole school while the sorting was still going on. Andrew, already too apathetic to the world by age eleven, had just felt an odd low sinking in his stomach and turned back to face the front, waiting for the Professor to call another name.  _ Doe  _ came long before  _ Minyard  _ in the list, but Andrew hadn’t even had a reprieve after he was sorted, because a second year at the Hufflepuff table had immediately grabbed him by the shoulders and said  _ I’m Aaron’s cousin, who on Merlin’s earth are you! _

It only took him the length of that feast to get the lay of Nicky: a head taller than the twins already, and boisterously cheerful with a sharp undercurrent of anxiety that Andrew was sure nobody else noticed. It was harder to get a handle on Aaron, who was at the next table, gaping at him over two rows of dinner plates. As Andrew sat there during the feast, munching on a piece of chicken and anticipating dessert, someone asked him, “How come you and your twin don't have the same surname?”

Andrew had pretended he didn’t hear a word they said.

After Aaron wrote home to Tilda and demanded answers, the whole story was revealed. That she’d seen a seer while pregnant, and there had been a prophecy that the firstborn twin would be a squib. That the twins’ dad hadn’t been a pureblood, like she’d told everyone, but a muggle, and she’d been worried that having a squib child would give that away. Hearing that, at first, had made Andrew scared and miserable at the thought that maybe he wasn’t supposed to be at Hogwarts after all, maybe they’d decide he didn’t belong and kick him back to the misery of foster care. But he took some vindication in quickly learning that he had a flare for combative magic that his teachers were rather amazed by. Definitely not a squib. Andrew promptly decided that all divination was bullshit, and that he hated Aaron’s mother with everything he had.

It was a little while later that he realised Aaron was actually the one struggling with practical magic. He still had enough of a spark to get into Hogwarts and scrape his way through classes, though, so that seer had been wrong –– had ruined their lives over nothing at all. If Andrew hadn’t already decided revenge was pointless, he would have hunted her down and shown her  _ just  _ how good at magic he could be.

Of course, all of it came out when both Nicky and Aaron wrote home immediately after finding Andrew, but the truth was complex in the adults’ eyes. Though they weren’t one of the older pureblood families, the Hemmicks took a lot of stock in tradition, and felt taking in a child who’d been raised as a muggle would be wrong –– it was the culture that mattered more than the blood, to them. So Andrew was still sent back to foster care each summer for the first few years. The group homes were better than the family placements he’d been in as a child, but it was still difficult, was still enough to have him keeping hold of his wand under his pillow every night and counting the days until the new Hogwarts term started. Until…. Well.

When Neil is done recovering from what has to be the most he’s ever heard Andrew talk, he asks, lowly, “What happened before that, though? In your childhood, in foster care?”

Andrew chews that over for a moment like a physical object –– the uncomfortable shortness of breath it brings, the way it feels like a hard object is sinking in his stomach, twisting all of his insides up. He takes a drag of his cigarette, thinks about the way Neil so carefully hides his chest when they change out for Quidditch and flinches at the mention of any dark hex or curse, and spits out, “I’ll tell you if you show me your scars.”

An even trade.

He sees the moment it takes Neil to think it over, and how it’s really not a long moment, at all. There, in the harsh winter chill, the very beginnings of snowflakes forming in the air around them and the stars glinting overhead, Neil shows. And Andrew tells.

* * *

It’s different, having said it out loud. The few sparse meetings he’s had with therapists before, he’s never really  _ said  _ it, has talked around it and lashed out with sharp implications, has talked about what it  _ did  _ to him. But he never said the words, not really.

Now, Neil knows. It feels very, very different. Andrew feels raw, like he’s scraped his knees and been pressing at the wounds –– or more like he’s cut himself open and exposed some sort of vital organ, and now doesn’t know how to keep it safe from the outside world.

It’s extra confusing in the way Neil really doesn’t treat him any differently. Neil was always careful with touch and boundaries, was always an equal part cautiously awkward and probingly snarky. He doesn’t change, and so in return, Andrew doesn’t change either, doesn’t let the knowledge of the gruesome scars Neil’s father’s magic has left beneath his clothes.

Okay, maybe he lets it change him a  _ bit.  _ That’s the only explanation for how he ends up agreeing to practice Quidditch in the park the day before Christmas, just because Neil asks him to.

“You have  _ never  _ agreed to play Quidditch with me outside of Hogwarts,” Kevin, who apparated up from Wiltshire just for the day, says accusingly when Andrew gets onto his broom.

“You’ve never asked nicely,” Andrew says mockingly. Kevin just gives him a frustrated look and heads over towards Neil. Aaron had opted not to play and Nicky and Erik are joining in casually, but that mostly seems to consist, right now, of Nicky kissing Erik’s nose over and over again and the pair of them giggling as they try and get on the same broomstick, so Andrew doesn’t have high hopes of this turning into a proper game.

He watches Neil and Kevin from a few metres away, just far enough that he can’t hear what they’re saying but can see the irritated look on Kevin’s face and the confused expression on Neil’s. Eventually, Andrew manages to convince himself not to care, and kicks up into the sky. As usual, there’s the unpleasant flip of his stomach as soon as he gets more than a few feet in the air, but he grits his teeth and forces himself to move through it. He flies over to the tall tree they’ve agreed to use as a goal marker, and sets himself up.

They play a casual two-on-two, Erik and Neil against Kevin and Nicky –– “for  _ balance,  _ since you suck, _ ”  _ Kevin insists, when Nicky complains about being separated from his boyfriend –– with all of them trying to score against Andrew. Andrew doesn’t put much effort into it, but he does make a point of batting away all of Kevin’s goals, just to see him get flushed and annoyed. After a while, it becomes so amusing that Andrew starts blocking against everyone. Nicky and Neil are the only two who managed to get a goal against him in the first twenty minutes of playing, anyway, since Erik just fumbles with the quaffle every time he catches it, but Andrew doesn’t let a single one of them score after that.

It’s far more amusing like this, playing well when there are absolutely zero stakes and nobody else is there to witness it. He can see the way it’s gradually making Kevin’s blood boil and can just hear the  _ why can’t you play like this when it matters?  _ brewing on his tongue. 

They’ve been playing for about forty minutes when the weather, already cold and miserable, starts kicking up a notch. A strong breeze sweeps the park, the threat of snow hanging heavy in the air. Andrew hunches further into his coat and holds onto the broom so tight that his knuckles strain white as an even stronger wind passes through, buffeting all their broomsticks around. 

Andrew can sometimes forget what the threat of being up this high feels like, but that’s only when he has his broom completely under his control. He likes being a goalkeeper because he’s isolated in the hoops, while the rest of the players knock into each other and try to tackle each other out of the damn sky; he, at least, is in charge of himself. It’s why he hates playing in extreme weather –– because that control is taken back out of his hands again. The strong breeze and the buoyant white clouds above them are building now, and the slight amusement he was getting out of irritating Kevin starts to leech back out, until Andrew is stony faced and shivering.

Kevin’s trying to coach Nicky on plays across the park, so there’s nobody there to hear it when Neil swoops towards Andrew, pulls up in the air right next to him, and lightly asks, “Why do you look like you’re gonna throw up?”

Andrew weighs several answers, and then, deciding the truth is often the best way of lying, says flatly, “I’m afraid of heights.”

He should have known, of course, that Neil would see through him in the way nobody else ever fucking does. Neil’s mouth drops open and he stares at Andrew for one long moment. A single snowflake drifts down and catches in Neil’s eyelashes, and Andrew’s the only one there to notice it. He hates everything.

“Andrew,  _ how?”  _ he asks, eventually, his voice quiet and absolutely baffled. “What are you doing up the Astronomy tower or on your roof every night or –– playing on the fucking Quidditch team, then?”

Andrew regards him for one long moment. It’s as another snowflake catches in Neil’s ridiculous long eyelashes that he finally admits, “Feeling.”

It’s a vague answer, and he hates the look Neil gets in his eyes –– like he completely understood what Andrew meant. Andrew can’t wait until the holidays are over.

* * *

Their Christmas day is small and subdued, except for Nicky and Erik’s mushy excitement, which they can thankfully mostly direct at each other. They all eat lunch together, and Nicky gives everyone gifts, but then Aaron disappears to floo Katelyn and Andrew grabs a bottle of firewhiskey, heading to his own bedroom and out the window to the roof.

Neil, of course, follows him. He takes one swig of firewhiskey when Andrew offers but declines any more, and they sit in silence together for a little while, close enough that their shoulders brush together every time Andrew takes a breath. 

When they’ve been up there so long that his lips are going blue in the cold air, Andrew says, “Merry fucking Christmas,” and gives Neil back his own lighter.

Neil passes it between his hands for a moment, staring down at the intricate goblin-forged metal, and then hands it straight back to Andrew.

“Merry Christmas,” he repeats. Andrew clenches his fist around the lighter and ignores the hideous twisting in his stomach, the way his whole body feels drawn to lean into Neil, so close beside him, the way he feels magnetised to just  _ touch, touch, touch.  _ It’s not fair. None of this is fucking fair.

**JANUARY**

The new term starts, and returning to Hogwarts brings, for perhaps the first time ever, a strange relief –– at least Andrew now sleeps the comfortable length of an entire dungeon away from Neil Josten.

Of course, everything else is just as grim. It’s back to unbearable early-morning Quidditch practices in the snow and trudging through the dull course load of his NEWT classes. An added sort of pressure has also emerged in the form of the slow creep towards graduation. At the start of seventh year the New Year had still felt like a sort of buffer between them and reality, but now everyone’s hyperaware that they’re marching through the last term of their classes before everything just becomes revision and exams –– that this is their final Quidditch season, the final meetings of their clubs and friendship groups, whatever.

Andrew doesn’t feel nostalgic about any of that stuff and certainly won’t miss it when he’s graduated, but the constant talking about it all begins driving him mad less than a week into term. Conversations about what everyone is planning to do after Hogwarts begin cropping up at every corner. Andrew can’t turn left in the library or go to the kitchens for a cookie or even take a damn bath without overhearing someone’s conversation about  _ careers.  _ Aaron is, of course, going straight into healing school at St Mungo’s, as is Katelyn, not that Andrew cares what  _ she’s  _ doing, and Kevin has his pick of Quidditch teams to play for. Andrew also learns, against his own will, that Matt is being scouted by Puddlemere, and Dan Wilds is thinking about coaching in a kid’s Quidditch league, and Allison has a fashion apprenticeship set up at Madam Malkin’s, and Renee wants to work for a muggleborn outreach charity. Several of their other classmates have a more terrified  _ who the hell knows  _ look on their face during these constant conversations about the future, but Andrew can’t help but notice that among their immediate acquaintances –– the people he at least  _ speaks  _ to, even if he wouldn’t call most of them friends –– he’s the only one who doesn’t seem to have a fucking thing figured out past June.

Well. That’s not quite true. There’s him, and also Neil.

Neil, actually, seems to be enjoying January even less than Andrew is. He comes back from the Christmas break pink-cheeked and cheerful, seeming more refreshed than Andrew’s perhaps ever seen him, but swiftly seems to begin retreating into himself. Andrew hates that he even notices it, but he’s become used to Neil barraging him with Quidditch strategies during lunch, or talking his ear off about dark magic with alarming calmness while they sit in the Quidditch stands waiting for Kevin. Most people probably don’t think of Neil as chatty, and probably don’t notice him getting less so, but Andrew finds himself unable to ignore it.

By the third Saturday of the month, the 19th, Neil is barely talking. Even more alarmingly, he skips the inter-year Quidditch friendly that Coach Wymack is running on the pitch that day. He’s lucky Kevin is distracted by the match –– and by being an awkward mess around Wymack, like he has ever since he found an old letter from his mum –– and doesn’t question where Neil’s gone, but Andrew notices.

And, well, it’s not like he was planning on playing the friendly anyway. It’s good to have an excuse to skip it, right?

It’s not hard for Andrew to track Neil down, although he tries not to read too much into that. Neil’s around the back of the pitch, leaning against the edge of the Slytherin stands, rolling an unlit cigarette between his fingers. When he sees Andrew, he doesn’t look surprised –– he doesn’t look much of anything, really, kind of just blank, but he does push off from the stands, and holds the cigarette out towards Andrew. Andrew takes it.

“I was gonna go for a walk in the forest,” Neil says, voice low and absentminded. “You can come, if you want to.”

“I don’t want to do anything,” Andrew tells him snippily, but somehow he finds his feet moving anyway, following along as Neil walks silently through the grounds and all the way down to the dark, imposing treeline of the Forbidden Forest.

Andrew has been in the Forbidden Forest a few times before –– a couple for detention, once to help Nicky find some dumb rare plant –– but he’s never been particularly interested in it. Some people are terrified of it and others are drawn to it by pure rebellion or the allure of danger, but Andrew’s had enough danger in his life already that he doesn’t see the appeal of  _ that _ . Still, he’s not afraid. He tells himself to not be impressed by how clearly unafraid Neil is too, as they go striding through the line of the trees.

It’s dark in the forest, but somehow warmer than the rest of the grounds, since the thick canopy of trees has protected it from the worst of the January snow. Andrew still tugs his coat a little tighter around himself and casts a grouchy look at Neil’s back as they delve further into the woods, leaving the last slither of daylight behind them.

“Any time you want to tell me where we’re going,” he eventually grouches, after they’ve been making their way through a tangled path of roots and dangerous-looking plants for at least fifteen minutes. Neil glances over his shoulder and blinks like he’d almost forgotten Andrew was there.

(Andrew tries not to consider whether he should take it as a compliment that Neil, the hyperalert runaway, feels comfortable enough in his presence to forget  _ anything _ .)

“I asked the Creatures professor about where they keep the different animals during the term,” Neil says, as he pushes through a thick copse of brambles. “I think I got the directions right. It should be just along –– ah.”

He pauses, giving Andrew enough time to catch up with him at a break in the trees. He shrugs deeper into his coat with annoyance and glances around Neil’s shoulder to the sight beyond –– a barren, snow-covered clearing, and in it, a whole herd of thestrals.

Andrew’s breath catches for one traitorous moment. He thinks about the first day of term, standing in front of the carriages with Neil and thinking  _ you can see them too.  _

“Last I checked, you didn’t know what thestrals  _ were _ ,” Andrew says snippily, to hide any other feelings he might be having. Neil shrugs, and takes a few steps further into the clearing. He slings his bag off his shoulder, that ratty, undetectably extended backpack he had back when Andrew first met up, and reaches inside to pull out an entire sack of animal food.

“I was reading back in the Defence textbooks to get caught up this term, and I saw them in the creature’s section. I’m surprised you didn’t say anything about it in September.”

Andrew snorts. “Are you?”

“Okay, no, I guess not. You’re too stubborn to ever say anything  _ helpful.” _

“Would asking you “so exactly how have you seen death” in front of two hundred other students been particularly helpful, then?”

Neil shoots him a particularly irritated look, andsighs. The thestrals across the clearing seem to have noticed their presence, and Neil takes a few hesitant steps forward, reaching into the bag for what looks like a handful of lumpy grain –– what is presumably the Care of Magical Creatures professor’s approved thestral food –– and holding it out in the flat of his palm. Most of the herd look distrustful, but one of them, the smallest and youngest looking, takes a few hesitant steps towards Neil on its bandy, skeletal legs.

“Come on, dude,” Neil says lowly, encouragingly, to the thestral, as he beckons it a little closer. It takes a couple more tentative steps. “Come on, come and talk to me. It’s my birthday, you know."

Something heavy settles in Andrew’s stomach. This is the first he’s heard about Neil’s  _ birthday,  _ and his gloomy silence over the last week begins to make more sense, a puzzle just on the brink of forming together in Andrew’s mind. Most people’s eighteenth birthdays are an exciting event, a celebration, but he knows that for people like him and Neil, the days which are supposed to be happiest are often the most fraught with bad memories.

“Give me some of that,” Andrew says, and grabs a handful of the mushy thestral food. Neil looks sideways at him, and his face is full of relief, maybe even gratitude, like he’d been desperately hoping Andrew wouldn’t make a big deal out of what he just said.

“The, uh, the professor said the adult thestrals prefer meat, but the younger ones eat a diet more similar to horses,” Neil explains. “I told her it was for a research project for Defence and she gave me this. It seems interested, right?”

The thestral seemed more than interested. As soon as Neil had turned his attention towards Andrew, his hand full of food still outstretched, the thing had apparently judged it safe to creep forwards. It nudges its soft nose into Neil’s hand a scant moment before Neil glances back at it, and Andrew gets to watch him startle, catching himself in the movement before he can scare the thing away and moving one hand up to gently stroke its nose while it eats.

“Look at that. Death likes you,” Andrew observes dryly. Neil scrunches up his nose while the thestral licks his hand clean.

“I knew that already. I didn’t know that death  _ tickles.” _

He seems pleased, though. Andrew doesn’t know why this is what Neil’s judged as an ideal birthday activity and he’s not about to ask, but he has to admit, it’s not a vile way to spend an afternoon. It’s quiet and at least he’s not being forced to play Quidditch. (And he maybe doesn’t completely loathe the excuse to spend the day around Neil, either.) Eventually, another one of the younger thestrals breaks away from the pack, and heads over towards Andrew. It seems more confident than Neil’s one, or has maybe just assessed the threat more thoroughly, because it goes straight for Andrew’s hand and begins greedily wolfing down the food.

“Brat,” Andrew tells it, but the thing seems unbothered. Andrew sighs, and, despite himself, reaches for some more food when it’s done eating. He and Neil stay like that for a while longer, just feeding the foals in silence.

“Getting older is so weird,” Neil eventually says. He’s not meeting Andrew’s eyes as he says it, but Andrew looks over at  _ him,  _ watches Neil digging his teeth into his plump lower lip. “I wish I could have come to Hogwarts for all seven years. I mean, I’m glad I got to come here at all –– I never thought I would. But now I only just got here and I’m already about to leave.”

“Don’t be overdramatic,” Andrew tells him. “You’ve still got five whole months.”

“Yeah, but it’s gonna rush past. The first term did. And then we’re gonna be out in the world, and I don’t have a  _ clue  _ what that means. I mean, I’ve spent my whole life surviving out there, but never actually  _ living.  _ I don’t know how to get a job or a house or anything. I don’t even know what I want to do.” It’s the same damn existential crisis Andrew’s been hearing left and right from their classmates, but somehow it doesn’t irritate him as much when Neil says it. Maybe he feels that Neil’s fears are a little more grounded, or maybe Andrew is just pathetically fucked, but he isn’t even annoyed when Neil slants a glance sideways and asks, “What are  _ you  _ going to do?”

Andrew grits his teeth. “I don’t know.” One of the smaller thestrals licks at the palm of his hand, and Andrew admits, “I’ve had a couple of owls from Quidditch teams who wanted to come to Hogwarts to watch me play this term, but I threw them all out.”

He knows, even as he says it, that it’s an admission Neil won’t be able to understand. Sure enough, there’s a long beat of silence, and when Andrew looks at him Neil’s jaw is dropped open, staring in wide-eyed horror.

“Andrew, that’s –– those are  _ professional teams!  _ I know you don’t like the heights and maybe it’s not your favourite thing, but you’re  _ so  _ fucking good, and they want to scout you? How can you just throw away a chance like that. Don’t you at least want to see what it would be like?”

“I don’t want anything,” Andrew tells him, because that’s true. Or –– it was true. Or is still true? Or is true in most areas of his life, at the very least. 

“I don’t understand you,” Neil says miserably. “I hate that I started so late. I’ll never get to play professionally now. I only even got to be on the Hogwarts team for one year. It’s my favourite thing in the world, and I just completely missed my chance.”

“Don’t act so pathetic. It’s not like one of those ridiculous muggle sports where you’re only fit enough to play it until you’re twenty one, or whatever. There’s no hard rule that you have to be scouted out of Hogwarts. Go play on an amateur league and work your way up, if you’re so fucking obsessed.”

He hears the rustling of Neil fidgeting, feels the shift of cold air as he sighs.

“Maybe,” Neil says. He feeds the thestral another handful of grain. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to do any of this. I mean, it’s not like I exactly had the best role models when it comes to careers. So long as I don’t end up anything like my dad, that’s probably the best I can hope for.”

Andrew thinks that ‘ending up’ like anything at all will be the best  _ he  _ can hope for.

They stand there for a few minutes, Neil restless and Andrew stoically still, feeding the thestral foals in silence, before Neil turns to Andrew again.

“New game,” he says. “Give me a truth, about the thestrals.” 

“You don’t ask for much, do you?” Andrew snorts, really having no intention of doing that, but then the thestral nudges its nose against the soft skin of his palm and Neil’s looking at him with those big blue eyes, looking luminescent against the backdrop of the snow-soaked clearing, and Andrew finds himself saying, “I watched Aaron’s mother die. Your turn.”

“I watched  _ my _ mother die. My father liked torturing with magic best, but he used his bare hands to kill her.”

“The father you want to be nothing like,” Andrew surmises. He knows he should use this moment to dig down that train of thought, but it’s all sticking together in Andrew’s mind, their previous conversation and this one, and he can’ help it. So he’s a masochist. “And yet it doesn’t bother you being in the company of someone like him?”

Neil looks startled, but his gaze slides up and down Andrew evaluatingly, and quickly settles again.

“You’re not a Death Eater, Andrew,” Neil says, so sure of himself that it makes Andrew’s stomach churn. Of course he’s not, but who is Neil to say it with such confidence? Who is Neil to presume he knows Andrew so well, to presume Andrew couldn’t be still hiding things from him. Who is Neil to think he knows anything about Andrew at  _ all?  _

“I didn’t say that. But your father was locked up for being a murderer, wasn’t he?” Andrew points out. His chin juts out defiantly –– a challenge, a  _ dare.  _ He’s been getting too comfortable in this situation with Neil. He knows it’s going to shatter eventually, and he decides in that moment that the best thing to do is hurry it along. Maybe it will hurt less if he can spare himself the drawn-out process. “And you were outspokenly pleased about it. So doesn’t it bother you to know that you are in the company of a murderer now, too?”

But Neil. Neil. Fucking Neil. Just raises an eyebrow, and looks down into Andrew’s eyes. He doesn’t even flinch.

“Does it bother  _ you? _ ”

“To be in the company of myself? Not lately.”

“No. To be in the company of me.”

Andrew is not a stupid man. He can put the pieces of any puzzle together quickly, can infer from the barest scraps of words or even just a sly look what most people’s intentions are –– what  _ they  _ are, as a whole. But he can’t fucking get a pin on Neil Josten. Because with that, it almost sounds like Neil’s implying ––

“Are you trying to tell me you’re more scorpion than frog? Because I still think you’re just a pathetic rabbit.”

“I’m trying to tell you that nothing you can say would scare me. And there’s probably nothing you’ve done that’s worse than what I have, in the name of survival.”

“You don’t know mine was in the name of survival,” Andrew points out. “You don’t know what name it was in at all.”

“Of course I do,” says Neil, as if it’s –– as if it’s just that  _ simple.  _ “I don’t think you’ve ever done anything in your life without a carefully weighed stack of reasons. So if you’re telling me you’ve killed people, it was either to protect someone you love or to protect yourself, and I couldn’t give two shits about that. I’ve seen it done for less.”

Andrew isn’t speechless. He’s never speechless, in that he’s never stunned _out_ of speech –– he never lets his ability to speak be _taken_ away from him, of course he doesn’t. It’s just right then that he doesn’t quite know what to say. He feels Neil’s knowing gaze like an uncomfortable itch under his skin. He feels more than just Neil’s two cool blue eyes on him, like he’s being seen all at once in a way he hasn’t since he was a kid.

“But hey, let’s visit the thestrals together again sometime,” Neil says, and walks away, leaving Andrew alone in the middle of the snowy clearing.

Fuck. Fuck him. Neil Josten is the most annoying person on the planet and it’s awful and it’s even more awful that it’s so intriguing. Why is  _ has seen death  _ so high on Andrew’s list of what he can get horny over, anyway?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the AMAZING andrew/neil/thestral dolls were made by [puffins-studio](https://puffins-studio.tumblr.com/) and are just about the cutest thing ever!!!!
> 
> you can find me on [acerenee](https://acerenee.tumblr.com) for aftg stuff or [milominderbindered ](https://milominderbindered.tumblr.com) for everything else! and pls leave a comment and let me know what you thought ily all bye


	4. chapter four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> heads up, some sex stuff occurs in this chapter –– it's not explicitly described, but we do see scenes of it. you won't miss much plot if you do want to skip through those bits!

**FEBRUARY**

As soon as February hits, some obnoxious fifth years apparently decide to combat the lasting dreariness of the snow outside by filling the castle head-to-toe with Valentine’s Day decorations. They cover the castle walls in ugly pink posters, charm heart-shaped confetti to float overhead and explode in flurries whenever anyone walks through a doorway, and enchant all suits of armour on the fourth floor to offer red roses to anyone who walks past them. Tiny cupid statues begin popping up in random classrooms and playing out-of-tune harp music. The  _ magical artistry  _ club takes over the Great Hall for an entire evening to help people make magical Valentine’s cards to bombard their unsuspecting crushes with. Andrew can’t even get a hot chocolate from the kitchens without the whipped cream being pink.

It’s unbearable, and it only gets worse from there.

In the second week of February, Katelyn sends Aaron a singing bunch of flowers, which pop up in front of him at breakfast and serenade him; Aaron rolls his eyes, but the flush on his cheeks is clearly pleased, and Andrew has never felt less related to his brother. A player from the American national Quidditch team who Kevin played against in the World Cup last year, Thea Muldani, sends Kevin a letter which has him blushing pink for a full day. Matt cancels an entire Quidditch practice so he can take Dan to Puddifoot’s on a rescheduled Hogsmeade weekend. The entire castle has gone insane, and Andrew feels like the last bastion of sanity left on the front lines.

“I think it’s all sweet,” Renee says, during one of the rare walks she and Andrew are taking on the grounds. Andrew likes Renee because she’s the only person at this school who gives him a run for his money in Defence Against the Dark Arts –– well, other than maybe Neil, lately –– and the only person who’s been willing to practice duelling with  _ actual  _ dark magic with him in secret as well. But he also likes her because she’s generally sensible and doesn’t talk too much. It’s just Andrew’s luck that she’s chosen today to get chatty. “I know some of it might seem a little performative, or over the top, but I don’t think there’s ever anything wrong with showing people you care about them. It doesn’t even have to be about romance.” She looks wry as she adds, “I would have got you flowers to thank you for being my friend if I didn’t know you’d hate it.”

“I’d never speak to you again,” Andrew agrees, and tears down a handful of pink streamers charmed to hover in a nearby tree, crushing them into the slush of melting snow beneath his foot. Of course, because Renee is  _ Renee,  _ her words stay with him, unpleasantly ticking around in the back of his skull. If there is anyone Andrew cares about, is there any point in saying it? It goes against everything he stands for, really. But amidst the dull panic he’s feeling about the threat of everything ending at graduation… he doesn’t know.

But it’s actually got nothing to do with Valentine’s day when he and Neil bump into each other, late at night, on February 13th, at the Astronomy tower. 

Andrew’s just up there to smoke, and because it’s the highest place in the castle which has open walls for him to dangle his legs off, the dizzying drop below enough to kick his heart into motion and spur some semblance of real emotion in his chest. Okay, and he maybe kind of likes the view of the stars, too. It’s one of their rare nights without late Quidditch practice with Kevin, and Andrew thought he could make the most of it for some alone time –– something he rarely  _ ever  _ gets at Hogwarts.

So he’s startled, even if he’d never admit it, when Neil Josten suddenly appears in the doorway behind him. Andrew’s just in the process of lighting up his cigarette, and shoves it into his mouth to cover the way he jumps a little when he notices Neil’s form.

“Thought I might find you up here,” Neil says, like that’s a completely casual statement, that he’d go  _ looking  _ for Andrew in the ridiculously huge castle at midnight when it’s freezing as fuck outside. He crosses the tower and settles down on the uncomfortable stone floor beside Andrew, crossing his legs rather than dangling them off the edge.

“Can’t I get one fucking moment of peace,” Andrew grumbles, around his cigarette.

“With me around? Probably not. I have it on good authority that I’m a nuisance.”

That’s a fucking understatement. Andrew snorts, and looks away from Neil. The lighter is still in his hands, and Andrew should probably feel weird about using it in front of Neil, its previous owner –– maybe current owner? Andrew’s not sure how much that Christmas present exchange would hold up in a court of law. Neil doesn’t seem bothered by it, though, so Andrew keeps it in his hands. He’d grown reluctantly fond of the thing, and finds himself lighting all his cigarettes with it these days, even though he always used to just use his wand.

“Are you ever going to tell me the story behind this thing?” Andrew finally asks, flipping the lighter back and forth between his fingers and watching the little spark of magic as it ignites.

Neil is quiet for a long moment, and then he shrugs, leaning back on his hands and tilting his head towards the night sky.

“It was the first magical thing my mother ever owned,” he says. “She bought it on her very first trip to Diagon Alley, when she’d just got her Hogwarts letter. She didn’t know anything about magic and I guess she found an old pawn shop and just thought the lighter was cool. But she found out later on that the crest on it—“ He gestures to the ornate carvings beneath Andrew’s fingers. “Is the crest of some super fancy American pureblood family. Someone noticed it when she got to Hogwarts, and just assumed she was some distant relative of that family. It was a really difficult time to be muggleborn, you know, with the war and everything, and my mum was always a survivor. She knew she’d be safer if she just ran with it, so she did. When she was seventeen, she went to America and tracked down one of the real members of that family, some old woman, and modified her memory until even she thought my mum was her granddaughter. It convinced my dad enough to marry her, I guess.”

The lighter looks ever more fascinating between his hands, now. Andrew knows all about living fake lives, but not ones of your own making.

“She sounds like an excellent liar,” he says.

“She was.” Neil looks sideways and gives him the edges of a grin. “Taught me everything I know.”

Andrew snorts. “You’re not as good as you think you are.”

“You and Kevin are the only people at this school who even know who I am. I’d say that’s pretty good.”

“Fooling the idiots around here isn’t remotely impressive.  _ I _ can always see right through you.”

“Well, that doesn’t count. You’re special.”

Andrew’s heart thunders around the word. He puts the lighter back into his pocket and takes a furious drag of his cigarette as it burns towards the end.

“You’re  _ especially _ annoying.” That just makes Neil laugh, the asshole. “So if this is some precious heirloom of your dead lying mother, why am I still holding onto it? Shouldn’t you be crying yourself to sleep with it under your pillow, or something?”

He’s joking, but Neil seems to take it a little too serious, his eyes cast downwards as he really considers the question. 

“I don’t know. Maybe most people would be. It’s complicated for me, though — my relationship with my mum.”

Andrew snorts. “Tell me about it.”

“Yeah. I guess you’d understand better than most people.” Neil sighs. He leans back again, and this time, his body is tilted closer to Andrew’s. He’s warm in the cold night air. “I don’t know. For a while after she died I couldn’t even look at that lighter without having a panic attack. Then for a while after that I couldn’t let go of it. I guess I’m trying to find some sort of balance, now. I loved her and I miss her, but she was... difficult. And thinking about her is difficult. But I’m learning how to move on to new things instead of thinking so much about the past.”

“Thinking about the past is always pointless. There’s nothing you can do to change the shittiness now.”

“Exactly,” Neil says. The way he so casually agrees with Andrew’s sharpness is as jolting as always. “And, I don’t know. I’d rather think ahead to the good stuff, make some better associations. There are new things I want to explore, now.”

He looks at Andrew as he says this, and for once, Andrew doesn’t think he’s imagining the way Neil's gaze drifts to his lips. 

What. The. Fuck. 

“You know I’m gay, right?” Andrew finds himself saying, feeling like he’s floating five feet above his own head and watching himself say the words. 

“Renee told me,” Neil says, looking a little guilty. “We were doing drills together at practice and it just sort of came up. She said you said she was allowed to tell me.”

“Hmm.” Andrew is having to hold himself back from the brink of insanity. It was one of his stupider moments, mentioning that to Renee, but he couldn’t help it. He doesn’t know how to do this, has  _ never  _ done this, but feels compelled to keep pushing, just a tiny bit further, against the pulled-tight rope of all his best instincts -- “And you have nothing to say about it?”

“What would I have to say? I mean, I don’t even know what I am.”

“I thought you were nothing?” Andrew mocks, remembering Neil’s words to Nicky’s prying questions back at Christmas. He’s trying to taunt, but Neil just grins, and shifts so one knee is pulled up and his whole body is facing Andrew.

“Nothing,” he repeats. “Isn’t that your favourite thing?”

Andrew’s breath catches on his throat. He can’t be imagining this, now. Is Neil —  _ flirting _ ?

Andrew drops his cigarette onto the cobblestones and shifts to face Neil, too. “Don’t be a smartarse. I should have pushed you off your broom when I had the chance.”

“Yeah,” Neil agrees lightly, shrugging. “Too late now, though.” 

Well, he’s not wrong there. Andrew’s stomach clenches and releases and ties itself in a knot all over again, and he feels like he’s boiling over with hatred, and he reaches across to Neil, and he kisses him.

Andrew only lets it last for a second. It’s not lost on him, of all people, that Neil flirting isn’t the same as him asking for anything, and Andrew won’t go further without the words. But he can’t help just that moment of indulgence. He sinks and instantly drowns in the knowledge of what Neil’s lips feel like, soft and ever-so-slightly parted and, against Andrew, who is always too cold, Neil’s mouth is just so, so warm.

When Andrew leans back, Neil doesn’t put a hand on him, but he clenches his fists in his lap and sways as close to Andrew as he can get without touching.

“I’ve never done stuff like this before.” Neil’s eyes are closed. He sounds breathless from just a second-long kiss. “But I want it. I really, really want you to do that again.”

He doesn’t push, and he doesn’t say please.

Andrew’s whole stomach turns over, and he clenches his fists hard enough for his nails to cut into the skin. He feels like he can’t get enough air to his lungs. All sense flies out of his brain, logic leaves him in its dust, and, like it’s the only way he’ll be able to breathe even again, Andrew leans in, and crushes their mouths together.

This time it’s hard and frantic, because Andrew doesn’t know how to do this by halves. He never thought he’d get to do this at all. He cups one hand around the back of Neil’s head and shoves him down to lay on the cold stone floor, and climbs on top of him, Neil’s thighs warm where they bracket Andrew’s body, and kisses him. He tugs Neil’s plump bottom lip between his teeth, noses down lower and bites at his neck, sucks bruises onto his freckled skin and tastes him; he memorises the smell of Neil’s hair and the touch of his careful hands against Andrew’s neck, the way every time they kiss it feels like an electric shock, like they’re trading in static. The forgotten cigarette burns down to embers beside them, and Neil gasps, “Andrew _ , Andrew,”  _ under the milky light of the stars.

**MARCH**

Any paranoia Andrew may have had about their kiss being a one-time thing or experimentation for Neil is steadily slashed to pieces over the next few weeks. At every available opportunity, Neil tugs Andrew into broom cupboards or the secret passage behind the Hufflepuff common room. When they’re eating lunch with Aaron and Kevin, Neil stretches his legs out underneath the table to press against Andrew’s, and grins at him. When they’re filing out of Potions together, Neil pretends to bump into Andrew just so he can brush their fingers together for a moment. Andrew refuses to talk about it, but no matter how many times he tells himself this is ridiculous and unsustainable, he keeps kissing Neil, and Neil keeps kissing him back.

Of course, making out at boarding school isn’t all that easy, even at one as chaotic as Hogwarts. They find an abandoned broom cupboard on the third floor and kiss in there for hours, but the spiders are unwelcome. The astronomy tower gets cold and the floor isn’t comfortable for doing anything that involves lying down. Neil keeps trying to drag Andrew into kisses on the Quidditch pitch when they’re out there alone, but the last thing Andrew needs is Quidditch coming into his –– whatever  _ this  _ is. There’s always the danger of a teacher walking into an abandoned classroom or any of the common rooms with comfortable sofas in them, or even a secret passage. Still, even with all the chaos, it’s more than Andrew ever thought he’d get to have. Every moment, every stolen kiss and sassy quip from Neil against the raw skin of Andrew’s neck, feels too good to be true.

For the first time, Andrew even manages to distract Neil from Quidditch. While Andrew’s own team captain keeps begging him to actually show up for practice for once, Andrew's the best player on his team and he knows Matt’s hardly going to kick him off this late in the year, so he keeps skipping practice to make out with Neil –– this is no surprise. The surprise is that Neil, in return, lets it happen too. He’d never miss a real practice, but for the first time since he arrived at school, Neil turns down a bewildered Kevin for a few night practices.

“Exams are coming up as well as Quidditch finals, you know,” Neil says, while Kevin is gaping at him across the lunch table. “I need to get some studying in  _ some  _ time. Not all of us have a guaranteed career path after school like you do –– I’m gonna need some NEWTs.”

Anyone who knows Neil should know he’s a disastrous procrastinator who has zero interest in schoolwork beyond doing enough to keep himself on the Quidditch team, Andrew thinks, but he doesn’t say it, because later that night Neil’s crawling into his lap in the secret room beside the kitchens, and it’s better than any Quidditch practise Andrew has ever had.

They end February and begin March just like that, a quickly spiralling trajectory of obsession with each others’ mouths and bodies. Andrew feels like he’s going steadily insane, but it comes more with the elevated feeling of being in the cloudtops than with the usual sinking hell he associates with emotions. The change is startling and he has no idea how to adjust to it, so he compensates by glowering at everyone else twice as much as usual, and doesn’t change a thing with Neil.

Then, in the second week of March, Hufflepuff plays against Slytherin. 

Hufflepuff’s sparse few wins this year have been fairly pathetic, but their season has been on a steady uptick in the last couple of months. It had started with Gryffindor’s star seeker coming down with a bad case of apparating pox and being benched for the season –– you really couldn’t play Quidditch when you were liable to disappear in midair and appear in a random spot ten feet away without your broom under you at any moment. Then Ravenclaw’s team, which was heavily loaded with fifth years, had all begun to freak out about OWLs and halved their practice schedule, which meant their season began taking a nosedive as well. Andrew credits the changes solely to both those things, and not at all to do with the fact that he himself has been making more effort than usual.

He tells himself, as he’s changing into his pads and Matt’s giving them an inspiring speech about staying strong in the face of last year’s champions and they’re all trudging out onto the pitch with bright sunshine blaring down on them, that he’s not going to try at all today. He’s not going to care about the outcome of this match and he’s  _ certainly  _ not going to put any extra effort in just because of who else happens to be flying around the damn pitch today.

Because Andrew is Andrew, he sticks to his resolution. He makes a cursory attempt at blocking a few goals, and then bobs limply in the air for the rest of the match, only knocking the quaffle away when it’s truly within arm’s reach anyway. Kevin and the other Slytherin seekers rack up the goals easily, but no matter how many times Matt shouts at him to  _ hustle, in Merlin’s damn name, Andrew!  _ from across the pitch, Andrew doesn’t give in.

Or. Well. Not giving in is relative. Because Andrew might still not be trying very hard, but if he’s honest, it’s more effort than he’s put in to almost any other match in the past four years. He knows any other keeper at Hogwarts wouldn’t make a single save if they were being as apathetic as he is, but he’s not any other keeper at Hogwarts, and, even like this, he’s doing pretty okay.

The benefit of playing to just be  _ pretty okay,  _ of course, is that he can divert his attention elsewhere without consequence. Through the whole match, Andrew keeps his attention focused on the fastest blur of green in the air, Neil flying around above all their heads and outpacing everyone else by miles in his search for the snitch. Every time he flies past Andrew’s hoops, he shoots Andrew an infuriated look, and Andrew feels another injection of motivation to do absolutely nothing.

After eighty three minutes, Neil catches the snitch and the Slytherin stands go wild. Matt gives Andrew a withering look as the defeated Hufflepuffs land back on the pitch, but Andrew ignores it; he’s made his point.

Afterwards, Andrew heads right to the changing rooms, but it doesn’t escape his notice that Neil stays behind on the pitch, flying a few more cooldown laps than he needs to as the crowds begin to file away. Andrew lingers as the Hufflepuff team is changing out, and lets everyone else get through the showers before him, pausing to dry his hair with a towel rather than a charm –– it looks better anyway –– so that, when he hears the pitch-side door to their changing room opening like he knew it would, he’s the only one left in the room.

“Did you get lost?” Andrew asks mockingly, rounding the corner of the changing room benches to see Neil, still fully geared up and sweaty with his broomstick clutched in his hand. “I would have thought the giant fucking badger on the door made it obvious that you’d found the wrong team.”

This doesn’t seem to make any impact through Neil’s thick skull.

“I thought you might at least put in some effort in an  _ actual  _ match,” Neil says, dropping his padded helmet to the floor and letting his sweaty hair flop into his eyes. He strips off his arm pads too, and then, without hesitating at all, his shirt, revealing his scarred chest, and he steps forward until he’s stood barely an inch away, breathing heavy in front of Andrew’s mouth. “But playing against you was still so fucking hot.”

Andrew grabs both sides of his face and kisses him.

The kiss is hot and frantic, even more than most of the others they’d shared. Andrew’s been careful so far –– has only let Neil touch his hair, and has kept his own hands above Neil’s clothes, even though Neil hasn’t set those boundaries himself. Neil, actually, seems keen on whatever Andrew wants to give him. 

For someone who had previously said he wasn’t interested in sex at all, Neil seems to have flipped on a dime since they began kissing. He doesn’t push and he doesn’t ask for things Andrew hasn’t offered, but he does look constantly desperate –– bowing into Andrew’s hands whenever Andrew touches him, gasping raw breaths and chasing Andrew’s mouth if he ever pulls away, mumbling filthy things into Andrew’s ear about  _ just how good your hands are.  _ At first it isn’t what he’d have expected of quiet, inexperienced Neil, but then at once it’s everything he should have expected: Neil likes everything in extremes. He either isn’t interested at all or is throwing his entire self into something with no regard for the consequences. It’s like watching him snap from meek and quiet to yelling in Kevin’s face; it’s like his damn Quidditch obsession. 

Neil’s hands wind into Andrew’s hair and tug, and his lips pull off Andrew’s roughly, descending to lick a ragged stripe up his throat and bite down on the crook of his neck. Andrew’s breath hitches, despite himself. The smell of Neil’s sweat shouldn’t be a turn on, but he’s an absolute gay moron, so it is. He finds himself nosing into Neil’s hair, and sliding his hands up Neil’s bare torso. He thumbs at one of Neil’s nipples and feels it get hard underneath his hand. Neil makes a tiny noise into Andrew’s skin.  _ Fuck.  _

“Andrew,” Neil mumbles, and Andrew tugs him back up to kiss him properly again. The way Neil carefully keeps the lower half of his body distant isn’t lost on Andrew, but right then, it feels like the least important thing in the world.

He’s tensed to notice the first tiny sign Neil gives him of wanting to stop, but all Neil’s signals are  _ go go go.  _ After weeks of scraping for privacy, Andrew finally feels desperate enough to ignore reason. Everyone else has long since left the changing rooms and a quick glance confirms nobody’s left any of their possessions behind; there shouldn’t be any reason for anyone to come in here now. 

“You need a shower,” he says, pulling away from Neil’s mouth and shoving him back against the changing room walls. Neil’s mouth is wet and a red flush is spreading down the tan skin of his chest, winding around the puckered scars of dark magic. His eyes look glassy and indistinct, and it seems to take him a moment to even process Andrew’s words. 

“Right _now_?” Neil protests, trying to press back towards Andrew, but Andrew dodges his lips.

Andrew has –– been with other people. Disregarding the awful things which happened to him a long time ago, there have been things he’s  _ chosen _ to do. There was the guy from his Quidditch team earlier this year, and Roland over the summer, and a muggle guy he’d experimented with a little the summer before that, too. It doesn’t feel like much of a groundwork to Andrew, but he knows it’s miles more experience than Neil has. But it’s all still a confusing minefield for Andrew, and brand new to Neil. If Andrew had a sensible bone in his body, he’d force them to take this slow, for both their sakes. If Andrew had a sensible bone in his body, he wouldn’t be doing  _ this  _ at all.

But Neil’s sweaty and half undressed and he won’t stop staring at Andrew’s mouth. There’s a bulge in his green Quidditch leggings. He doesn’t look uninterested, or like he wants to slow down.

Andrew bites the inside of his cheek, and then very carefully says, “If you shower, I could come with you. If you want.”

Neil gapes at him for one long second, and then says, “ _ Yes.” _

The yes is emphatic and he gives no reason for Andrew to question it. Andrew still hesitates there for a moment, caught in the trap of what he wants and what he’s afraid of letting himself have. But then he feels the racing of Neil’s heartbeat in his chest, below where Andrew’s palm is still pressed, and he just can’t resist anymore.

Andrew tugs Neil into the showers, pulls off the last of Neil’s gross Quidditch gear for him and pushes him under the magically-heated spray. If Neil is at all self-conscious about being naked, he doesn’t show it; he lets Andrew look his fill, and bows into his hands at every opportunity, and doesn’t seem to care at all that Andrew keeps his own jeans and shirt on under the water. 

This could, of course, just be because Neil seems to go speechless altogether when Andrew drops to his knees.

“If you want me to stop, just tug,” Andrew says, sliding Neil’s hands into his hair and glaring until Neil nods. 

Neil’s eighteen and has never done anything like this before. It doesn’t take him very long to come.

Andrew tries not to let it show on his face that the experience is intoxicating –– that his pulse is thundering through his body, that the blood has so completely left his brain that he feels a little dizzy as he climbs to his feet again, wiping the corner of his mouth. Neil drags him immediately into another gasping, breathless kiss, mouth open and tongue wet, and Andrew can only endure it for a few seconds.

“Get out,” he rasps, and Neil goes without protest. The sound of Neil towelling dry in the changing room outside echoes through to the showers as Andrew unzips his jeans and finishes himself off. (It doesn’t take him very long, either.)

Afterwards, Andrew emerges from the showers dripping wet in his clothes. Neil is leaning against the row of wooden cubbies across the room, having somehow located his own clothes from the other changing room, fiddling with the snitch from the game, catching it and then letting it fly two inches away before catching it again, over and over. Andrew shoots him a withering look as he stomps, dripping on the floor, over to his own cubby to find his wand and cast a drying charm.

The magic rushes over him with a cloud of hot air, leaving him warm and dry, his hair fluffy around his ears. Neil gives him a  _ look  _ which Andrew would describe as fond if he didn’t know any better.

“Shut up,” says Andrew.

“I didn’t say anything,” Neil points out. Asshole. “But hey, we’re missing lunch. Come on, I’m starving.”

Andrew snorts. “I bet you are.”

Still, he follows Neil out of the room and down to the kitchens. It doesn’t miss his attention that Neil sticks just a little closer into Andrew’s body that whole day, finds more excuses to lean his face close to Andrew’s or knock their arms together, never puts himself more than a couple of inches away. When they go outside to study in the sunshine after lunch, and Andrew lights up a cigarette with Neil’s lighter, Neil lays down on the ground with his head beside Andrew’s hip, looking up at him with moony eyes and breathing in the smoke. 

Andrew barely glances around to see if anyone’s looking before he drops his hand to the grass beside Neil’s head and gives one quick tug at his hair. He tells himself it’s an admonishing gesture, but the warmth that shoots all the way up through his fingertips the second he touches Neil says otherwise.

**APRIL**

The first weekend of April is a Hogsmeade weekend. With the madness of exams swirling around the whole of seventh year and the pressure over the final round of Quidditch matches bearing down on them in particular, Andrew wants nothing more than to get away from the castle for a little while. Aaron seems to agree, because they both decide to spend Saturday night sleeping at the flat in Hogsmeade instead of at the castle. Nicky is, predictably, thrilled to have them home, and takes it upon himself to cook dinner and regale them all with extensive tales of every tiny boring thing they’ve missed in the village this month.

Also, Neil comes. He’s not technically supposed to –– only of-age students who officially reside in Hogsmeade are allowed to stay there overnight during term time. But Neil does it anyway. Considering they’re only two months away from graduation, Andrew figures he probably doesn’t have to worry too much about breaking a couple rules. He doesn’t mention to anyone else that he’s the one who told Neil to come, without leaving much room for argument.

Nicky and Aaron don’t seem to find it too strange. Presumably having Neil there for the whole of the Christmas holidays immunised the both of them to his presence. Andrew only wishes he were so lucky; having Neil around still catches his attention and holds it hostage, distracts him from everything else around him, makes him feel warmer in the cheeks and like his stomach is trying to crawl out of his body and in whichever direction Neil happens to be at all moments. It makes it impossible to concentrate as they sit around the kitchen table that evening, Nicky and Aaron drinking firewhiskey, Andrew eating ice cream, and Neil shamelessly hustling them all at three different games of cards.

The better Neil fakes ignorance and the cockier he looks in the aftermath of each game, the more Andrew’s pulse thunders through his veins. He can’t quite drag his eyes away from the flush at the top of Neil’s cheeks, or the way the sharp point of his tongue flicks ever so slightly out of his lips when he’s concentrating, a tell that the other two don’t seem to have noticed in their drunkenness. It makes Andrew feel good to know that he’s noticed something about Neil that the others haven’t, that he still knows Neil better than anyone else, and then makes him annoyed in equal measure that he’s paying such close attention. He addresses this conflict by eating more ice cream.

“Who taught you how to play cards like that?” a drunk Nicky bemoans as he’s shoving his last galleon across the table towards Neil.

“A dead man,” Neil says cheerfully.

Aaron, also drunk but trying to hide it, shoots him an unpleasant look. “You’re so fucking weird, Josten.”

“Aw, don’t be mean, Aaron. It’s not his fault he’s weird.” Nicky drains the last of his drink and then lets out a huge yawn, his arms stretching above his head before flopping back down to the table with a  _ thud.  _ “Well, I better go to bed before Neil beats me out of this month’s rent. I can’t believe you let me get this drunk, guys! I’m supposed to floo Erik in the morning!”

“I tried to take the bottle away and you shot sparks at my face,” Aaron complains, but he’s pushing away from the table too, and heads down the hall towards his room without saying goodnight.

Andrew stays at the table, silently finishing his ice cream, with Neil re-shuffling the deck of cards beside him, until he hears Nicky and Aaron both finish taking turns in the bathroom and close the doors of their respective rooms. He waits a few more minutes for good measure, and then finally stands to put the rest of the ice cream back in the ice box. He stands over it for a moment just hoping to cool down, before turning back around to stare at Neil.

Neil’s using his wand to build a house of cards on the table. “Another game?” he offers, when he catches Andrew looking.

Andrew snorts, and crosses the kitchen to stand next to Neil’s chair. “I have no desire to play with you,” he says.

Neil grins. “Oh? You sure about that?”

His tongue presses against the edge of his lips again, in a way that leaves Andrew unsure whether he’d been unaware of how he was doing it all evening, if it was really the tell Andrew had thought it was, or whether he’d been purposefully trying to throw Andrew off. 

“Don’t think I won’t make you walk back to the castle right now,” Andrew warns him, threading his hand into Neil’s hair and squeezing hard. Neil just grins up at him.

“Yeah, right. Want me to go set up the sofa, though?”

This is the first time Andrew has had the chance to get Neil on a bed, behind a locked door. Neil is sitting at the table, smiling, while Andrew stands above him with his hand in Neil’s hair. Having Neil on the sofa drove Andrew insane in December; he’s not sure he could be reasonably expected to even survive it, now.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Andrew says, and goes to his room. Neil abandons the cards in a heap, and follows.

Of course, the fantasies of having Neil in his room and actually  _ having  _ him there are different. There’s no immediate kissing and they don’t tumble right to the bed in a heap of passion. Andrew locks the door behind them both and waves his wand to make sure there’s soundproofing wards up, and in the time it takes to do that, Neil has already moved into the room and started nosing around Andrew’s possessions.

“Your room doesn’t look like I thought it would,” Neil observes, poking at the bookshelf. It’s mostly Defence Against the Dark Arts textbooks and crime novels, but Andrew feels oddly vulnerable as Neil reads the spines. This is the first time anybody else has been in this bedroom –– even Nicky has only ever stuck his head around the doorway. He catches Neil by the wrist and turns him so they’re facing each other, standing just an inch apart, in the dim light of the oil lamp in the corner.

“Let me guess, you thought I’d have all black walls and no possessions.”

Neil shrugs. “Not really. I mean, I know nobody  _ else  _ thinks you have a personality, but I know better than that. It’s neater than I expected, though.”

“Just because you’re an incorrigible slob doesn’t mean the rest of us have to be.”   
  
“You like when I’m messy,” Neil says, and Andrew kisses him.

Andrew wants nothing more than to press Neil into his actual bed rather than the stone floor of the Astronomy tower or the rough door of a broom closet. So he does it. Neil lets himself be led to the bed easily, falls back onto Andrew’s pillows and lets Andrew climb on top of him, winds his hands into Andrew’s hair and doesn’t move them from there, even as Andrew’s own hands strip Neil out of his clothes and track a path all the way down his body.

It feels so different like this that Andrew can’t quite believe it. Not that he didn’t enjoy what they’ve done before –– but having Neil here, in his own bed behind his own locked door without having to worry about anybody else encroaching on them, feels  _ safe  _ in a way Andrew has never associated with sex.

He doesn’t want to admit how much that means to him, but he has a horrible feeling that Neil is kissing him so softly and passionately because he knows. Neil has an awful habit of being able to figure these things out.

“I want you to stay in here while I get off,” Andrew says. “Yes or no?”

“Yes, of course yes,” Neil says, his eyes going wide, only the thinnest ring of icy blue visible around his blown pupils. Andrew grits his teeth and takes mental stock of himself, running down his entire list of discomforts to see if anything’s being triggered, but –– it’s not. Fuck. He just wants this, and it feels okay.

In the most vulnerable moment, in his dark quiet room with Neil naked beneath him and the whole world reduced down to the size of this mattress, Andrew doesn’t even tell himself that he hates this. He buries his face in Neil’s neck and shoves his hand down his own trousers, and Neil plays with the soft hairs at the back of Andrew’s neck and mumbles some ridiculous things, and Andrew comes in no time at all.

“That was amazing,” Neil murmurs, sounding soft even though he’s an absolute mess of sweat and come and the imprint of Andrew’s teeth on his shoulder. “You’re amazing.”

“I hate you,” Andrew says, and surges back up to kiss him. Neil just smiles into it. Asshole.

When they’re done kissing, there’s a soft sated period that Andrew steadfastly refuses to describe as an afterglow, even though Neil does look kind of haloed by the candlelight and his gleaming skin. Andrew flicks Neil’s chin and sits up to prop the window open, lighting up a cigarette; Neil rolls over, still shamelessly naked on the bed, to lay with his head by Andrew’s hip. He seems to like that position, Andrew thinks. He’s like a cat, always wanting to curl up next to you to feel safe but staying  _ just  _ far away enough not to touch.

“When did you start wanting me?” Neil asks, turning his head so that the tip of his nose brushes against the slither of skin between Andrew’s jeans and the hem of his t-shirt. Andrew flicks cigarette ash out the window and scowls down at him.

“Who said I want you? I don’t want anything.”

“Uh-huh, you say that a lot. But you also say you don’t do anything you don’t want to do.”

Andrew bites the inside of his cheek. He’s not stupid; he can tell when Neil’s trying to trap him in his own logic, thinks he’s being clever. But Andrew also can’t let it slide, or go back on something he’s said, because Neil would be just as fucking smug. “I  _ don’t _ do anything I don’t want to.”

“And yet you’re doing me.” Neil’s mouth quirks up at the corner, infuriating and gorgeous. Andrew resists the urge to both throttle and kiss him. “So by reason, you must want me.”

Oh, he thinks he’s  _ so  _ smart. Andrew reaches down to press his palm into Neil’s cheek and turn his head away.

“Wanting to sleep with you and wanting the smart mouth and all the trouble that comes along with it are two different things.”

Even Andrew isn’t convinced by his own retort. Neil just grins wider, clearly thinking he’s won.

Andrew flicks his cigarette out the window and leans down to catch Neil’s smart mouth with his own. It’s the most effective way to shut him up, at least.

* * *

It’s not the best night’s sleep Andrew’s ever had. He can’t turn off his high-alert just like that. Having another body under the sheets with him, occasionally shifting his weight or breathing too loud, even if Neil is an unusually still and quiet sleeper, means Andrew jolts awake at least a couple times an hour.

He amazes himself, though, by managing to drop back off to sleep each time. The inherent discomfort of sharing his space is sort of levelled out by the positives. Andrew’s always so cold at night that he has to wake up and pile extra heating-charmed blankets on top of his duvet halfway through the night, but Neil’s body seems to radiate heat, like a personal hot water bottle. The smell of him against the linens, like sex-sweat and broomstick polish and his generic hair washing potion, is somehow intoxicating. And after Andrew gets over the jolt of fear each time he awakes to the weight of someone else in his bed and realises it’s  _ Neil,  _ his heart settles down in a way he doesn’t even know how to name –– a kind of safe feeling that he’s never experienced before, not once in his life.

* * *

It’s ridiculous, Andrew thinks, silently fuming at himself as he jolts awake again at sunrise, and elects to not try and go back to sleep but rather lay there and watch the way a beam of sunlight through the blinds illuminates Neil’s softly sleeping face. It’s ridiculous that he’s hanging this much emotion on something which has barely been going on for two months, and which surely can’t last much longer than this. Whatever is going on between the two of them feels fragile and unspeakable, like Andrew can’t even put it out into the air for fear it’ll get blown away. The countdown to graduation now feels like a far worse countdown to the end of this ridiculous immersion into happiness, considering neither he nor Neil know what they’ll do or where they’ll be when they finish school.

And yet Neil, snuffling into Andrew’s pillow, blinks his sleepy eyes open when Andrew finally gives in and pokes him on the shoulder. His eyes are ridiculously pale blue in the morning sunlight, and he smiles as soon as he sees Andrew, completely reflexive in his first moment of consciousness. Andrew’s heart jolts through his chest up to his throat, feeling like it injures several other organs along the way, and he shuffles so close under the duvet that their bodies are touching from head to toe.

He kisses Neil briefly, just testing out what a morning kiss like this would even be, and Neil goes into it happily. It’s softer and less combative than any kiss they’ve ever shared before.

As they break apart, in a quiet murmur of a voice in the morning quiet, Andrew leans close to Neil and tells him, “Your breath is disgusting.”

“Hmm,” Neil says, with a shit-eating grin, and leans in to kiss Andrew again. Andrew dodges it, but that backfires when Neil just switches to kissing his neck instead. Sounding more annoying than ever, he says into Andrew’s throat, “You’re welcome to put my mouth elsewhere, if you want.”

Andrew shoves him away completely, and Neil laughs.

“Go brush your teeth, moron.”

Neil’s still laughing as he fishes his t-shirt off Andrew’s bedroom floor and tugs it haphazardly on, ruffling his hair even further and somehow making his bare legs look ridiculously more tantalising. Andrew indulges himself in laying back in bed and admiring the thick muscles of Neil’s thighs as he moves to the door.

It’s early enough that nobody else will be up, especially not with the amount of drinking the other two did the night before. Andrew’s already making plans in his head for what they can do after Neil brushes his teeth –– even if they just have an hour or so before they should get dressed and go get breakfast to make sure they’re up before the others, there’s plenty of work he can do in an hour.

The plan he’s forming in his mind makes for a pretty perfect morning. Unfortunately, Andrew’s underestimated one thing.

What he’s underestimated is that Nicky had promised to floo call his boyfriend this morning, early enough to account for the timezones before Erik has to go to work, and Nicky’s big sappy heart is the only thing strong enough to overpower his hangover. So when Neil stumbles out of Andrew’s bedroom to dart to the bathroom, wearing just his t-shirt and underwear with a very obvious hickey on his thigh, Nicky’s standing right outside.

From inside the bedroom, Andrew hears Neil’s intake of breath, swiftly followed by the clatter of Nicky dropping something to the floor.

“ _ Um!” _ says Nicky, more a squeak than an actual word. “Neil, were you –– I mean, why were you in –– Oh, MERLIN’S! FUCKING! BEARD!”

He’s spotted Andrew through the cracked doorway now, still laying in bed amongst the rumpled sheets. Andrew flops his head back on the pillow and sighs. It’s not that he’s been going out of his  _ way  _ to keep this thing with Neil secret, but he wasn’t exactly hoping to be found out like this.

“Nicky––” Neil begins placatingly, but he doesn’t seem to know how to continue the sentence. Anyway, it’s too late now. Andrew rolls out of bed and walks over to the doorway behind him, just in time to see Aaron’s bleary head appear from his room across the hall, eyes ringed dark with a hangover.

“Can you keep it the fuck down?” he grumbles. Nicky wheels on him immediately.

“No, Aaron, I can  _ not!  _ Neil and Andrew are –– Aaron, if you knew they were hooking up and didn’t tell me I will  _ kill you! _ ” He flounders for a moment and then spins back around, attention shifting yet again. “Andrew! You never even told me you swing that way –– Neil, you said you didn’t swing at  _ all!” _

“Uh,” says Neil. His sexuality is a topic he hasn’t even broached with Andrew since they began doing whatever this is, and he looks like he has no idea what to say. He also looks extremely aware that he doesn’t have any trousers on. But across the hall, Aaron is looking even more confused than anyone.

“You’re gay?” he stammers out, looking past Neil like he doesn’t exist and staring right at Andrew. Andrew tries not to visibly let his hackles raise, but he’s immediately on edge. “What the fuck, Andrew?”

And Andrew knows, okay. He knows the wizarding world is far behind the muggle one when it comes to most social issues, and Aaron was raised by stuffy old purebloods, so he’s uneducated on this stuff. Prolonged exposure to Nicky doesn’t seem to have done much to change his mind, but that’s because Nicky always just cheerfully brushes off all his shittiness without addressing it. Andrew knows it doesn’t mean Aaron is an inherently spiteful person, just a bit of an uneducated asshole. He’s known that for years. It isn’t a direct influence on why he’s never come out to his family –– but in this moment right now, a churning pit in the bottom of his stomach, a little too close to genuine emotion for his liking, reminds him that the feeling of his brother’s judgement still doesn’t feel  _ great. _

“Problem?” Andrew challenges, crossing his arms over his chest and taking a step forward, drawing level in the doorway. Andrew is at least fully dressed in his pyjamas, but the edge of his bare foot presses against Neil’s and the contact feels like something of an admission.

“You never said anything.” Aaron’s voice is aghast. Even Nicky has paused with his loud exclamations of surprise in the face of Aaron’s reaction –– he takes a tentative step back so that he’s not stood between the twins, glancing between them like he’s not sure how to intervene, or whether he should at all.

“You never told me you were straight, either,” Andrew says mockingly. “You just started snogging your frog-choir girl all over the school.”

“You  _ know  _ her name.”

“Do I? Fascinating. And now you know Neil’s name, too. Are you done accosting us now? Because I had plans for Neil after he brushed his teeth.”

“ _ Plans _ ,” Nicky repeats to himself, sounding like he might faint any moment, and Aaron just stands there, jaw hanging open, as Andrew gives Neil a shove to set him off down the hallway again. As soon as Neil’s in the bathroom, Aaron starts to speak. Andrew slams the door before he can hear it.

He heads back to his bed and throws himself down, decidedly  _ not  _ thinking about how the sheets smell so much like Neil now. Well. That was his coming out experience, then. He supposes it could have gone worse.

* * *

Andrew doesn’t emerge from his room again until he’s sure Aaron has left for the day. Neil has fallen back to sleep, because he’s a moron who usually runs on about four hours a night thanks to Quidditch practice and clearly needs to catch up on his rest, so Andrew leaves him to it. He figures he’ll head down to Honeydukes to stock up on sweets, maybe run the couple of errands he needs to get done this Hogsmeade weekend so that he can just spend the rest of the day holed up in his room with Neil.

Unfortunately, he’s only accounted for  _ one  _ of his irritating relatives being gone. Before Andrew can even make it all the way down the corridor, he sees Nicky sitting at the kitchen table, two mugs in front of him, and his hands clasped awkwardly by his chest.

Andrew considers just making a break for it, but he’s already been spotted. Nicky meets his eyes, and pushes a mug of hot chocolate nervously across the table. He’s silent as he does it, which is rare for Nicky. The silence feels more like an offering than the hot chocolate, so Andrew steels himself for a conversation he’s going to hate, sighs, and sits down.

“Why did you never tell me, Andrew?” Nicky asks as soon as Andrew takes his first sip from the mug. “You didn’t think I would tell someone, or betray your trust, or something like that, did you?”

Andrew weighs his options: answering truthfully, saying something snarky, or throwing a fork at Nicky’s head and walking out. Eventually, he just says, “You never asked.”

Nicky looks aghast, as if Andrew’s just pointed out some huge fundamental flaw in his character. Maybe he has –– in Andrew’s opinion, the overbearing cheeriness Nicky uses to shield himself from the world leaves him little chance for genuine connection –– but Andrew’s not trying to be harsh. It’s just the truth. And really, until recently, he might not have answered even if Nicky  _ had  _ straight-up asked him whether he liked guys or not.

“I’m sorry,” Nicky says. Yet another display of useless emotion, Andrew thinks, but he’s just breaking through the foam on his hot chocolate so he stays a little longer. “I know taking care of you two wasn’t officially my job, but I really have been trying to look out for you both, ever since I found out you existed, and –– and I know I kind of sucked at it, but I wished you would have realised you could talk to me. I’m sorry if I made things harder.”

“You didn’t make things  _ harder,”  _ Andrew says, rolling his eyes. “You didn’t make things anything. Believe it or not, your reaction has never been something I’ve bothered to consider when it comes to my own sexuality.”

This is mostly true. It’s also something he thinks might make Nicky calm the fuck down a bit right now; Andrew’s studied apathy doesn’t comfort many people, but he thinks his cousin might be one of the few people who knows him well enough by now to take that as something of a compliment. Andrew thinks about everything, so the fact that he’s never thought much about coming out to Nicky is a compliment to him, really. If Andrew was the sort of person who liked to talk about things, Nicky probably  _ would  _ have been one of the first people he told.

“Right,” says Nicky, lifting his coffee to his mouth and staring into it, like he’s trying to see his future in the murky depths of the mug. Maybe he’s trying to see his past, instead, like a roadmap of mistakes.

“Great, so we’re done with this ridiculous heart-to-heart,” Andrew says, making to rise from the table with his hot chocolate –– only to be stopped by Nicky as he sprouts a ridiculous grin.

“Oh,  _ hell  _ no. That was just the emotional stuff –– now you owe me  _ deets!”  _ Andrew’s glare would be strong enough to make a weaker person burst into flames on the spot, but Nicky’s relentless in the face of it. “I mean,  _ Neil _ ! Way to score an absolute  _ cutie  _ on your first try, Andrew! Just like me and Erik –– there’s some good gay genes in our family, Andrew, I’m telling you.”

“Who says this is my first try?” Andrew asks blandly. Nicky blinks at him for a moment, but plows on.

“Well, regardless. Just look at those  _ eyes.” _

“Mmm.” Andrew hums in agreement just to watch the way Nicky’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise at actually getting anything out of him. Then, Andrew says, “But that’s the last time you will talk about Neil. Stick to admiring your own boyfriend.”

It’s too fucking early and he hasn’t had any coffee –– that’s Andrew’s only excuse for how it slips out. He’s just trying to be his usual shade of threatening, but he knows he’s messed up when Nicky breaks into an ear-splitting grin.

“Oh, my  _ own  _ boyfriend, huh? So that means Neil and you are  _ official?” _

This time, Andrew really does throw a fork at him, and flees back down the corridor with Nicky cackling behind him. This fucking family. Andrew escapes back into the sanctuary of his own room, and a sleep-bleary Neil Josten raises his head from the pillows in confusion.

“Why’d you let me fall asleep again?” Neil complains, sitting up in bed and stretching his arms above his head. The long line of his body is even more tempting to Andrew than the lure of Honeydukes sweets or breakfast.

Instead of answering, Andrew walks over and climbs back into bed too, dragging Neil into a kiss. Screw everyone else in the flat. He’s going to make the most of having Neil here, in his bed, before they have to go back to the castle at the end of the day. He might not get many more chances like this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as always, pls let me know what you thought ! and you can find me as acerenee or milominderbindered on tumblr if ya like


	5. chapter five

**MAY**

Andrew’s sitting with Neil at the Hufflepuff table, eating breakfast in comfortable silence, when Matt Boyd and his girlfriend descend upon them.

Well, okay, they don’t quite  _ descend.  _ They sit a couple spaces away down the bench and give Neil a wave, which Neil responds to, because for some reason he’s become friends with not just his own Quidditch team, but also every team captain at Hogwarts. His obsession is getting out of hand, Andrew thinks, spitefully drenching his pancakes in maple syrup as Matt strikes up a conversation with Neil.

“Dan just got a job offer coaching the Greater London Youth Quidditch league after graduation!” Matt says proudly, slinging his arm around her shoulders. Dan laughs and leans into his embrace.

“Babe, you don’t have to tell  _ everyone  _ you see. I get that you’re proud of me.”

“You’re gonna do  _ so  _ good!”

“Congratulations, Dan,” Neil says politely, when Matt and Dan are finished tangling up with laughter together. Dan pulls herself out from under Matt’s arm and reaches for the carafe of coffee in the middle of the table.

“Thanks, Neil. It feels really good to know what I’m gonna do when we leave, y’know? Hey, I’ve never actually asked before, what are you doing after graduation?”

Andrew goes for his butter knife the moment he realises what she’s about to say, but he’s too slow to stab her into silence, and the words are out. Neil’s face blanches white and he looks down at his plate, a half-eaten slice of wholemeal toast miserably abandoned.

“Er, I don’t really know,” he says, shrugging a bit. “I guess I’ll figure something out… hah.”

Neil rarely laughs or even smiles, so that little huff of breath isn’t convincing anyone that he’s lighthearted. Andrew watches Neil carefully to see the expression on his face, but doesn’t miss the fact that across the table, Matt kind of gets this look like Neil is a puppy he wants to adopt.

“But you’ll get scouted to some Quidditch team, won’t you?” Matt says. “I mean, the way Kevin talks, I thought you were already a sure thing.”

Andrew’s quick enough to notice the brief flash of hope on Neil’s face, but it’s nearly instantly wiped away.

“Nah,” Neil says. His tone of voice is going for casual, but fooling nobody. “I started too late. I hadn’t even played properly until September. Most of the scouts watch your development from at least fifth year onwards if they’re gonna sign you right out of school.”

Dan and Matt exchange a glance, although Neil’s still staring down at his toast and misses it. Andrew, on the other hand, watches them have a silent conversation in that way only couples who have been together years can have –– Matt widens his eyes a little, Dan raises an eyebrow, Matt inclines his head just a fraction in Neil’s direction. After a second, Dan looks back over at Neil, and takes pity on him.

“Oh, there’s a thousand jobs out there, Neil, you’ll find something!” she says. Despite never having played on her team, Andrew clearly recognises this as her ‘captain voice’ –– comforting and encouraging, but strong enough to leave no argument. “If you want to do something Quidditch related, it’s not just about playing. You could get a job at the England team’s training grounds, or the Quidditch shop in Diagon, or apply for a sports reporter job at the prophet.”

“I vote that one,” Andrew says, looking at Neil. “You need another output for your annoying opinions.”

“Maybe I will try that, yeah,” Neil agrees, although Andrew can tell it’s mostly just to placate Dan. Neil doesn’t want to do something Quidditch-related. He just wants to  _ play.  _ He’s not gonna be happy with anything else, Andrew knows. What an idiot.  
  


* * *

And yet, as the days pass, Andrew can’t help but feel this problem getting under his skin. Andrew hasn’t made any official plans for after graduation either, although he’s had another damn letter from a professional Quidditch team trying to scout him this month. He’s not bothered by his own lack of direction –– he’d be just as fine continuing his summer bartending job in Knockturn Alley as anywhere else –– but he can feel the anxiety leeching off Neil.

They’re spending more time together than ever, these days. Aaron’s deep in NEWT studying mode –– and, just maybe, slightly avoiding Andrew out of awkwardness after his coming out –– so Andrew hardly sees him anymore; Kevin’s just as obsessed with Quidditch finals as everyone else is with exams, and has doubled his training regimen, but is  _ also  _ obsessed with exams. Even Renee is focusing on making the most out of her last few months at Hogwarts and planning for graduation, so Andrew doesn’t see much of her, either. Plus –– well, he can’t  _ just  _ blame it on the others not being around.

The truth is, Neil has somehow managed to worm his way under Andrew’s skin and get stuck there. Andrew doesn’t know how the fuck it happened. There doesn’t seem to be a logical progression from meeting Neil in Hogsmeade this time a year ago, a dirty runaway who Andrew thought might be dangerous or worse but who he wasn’t overly invested in, to  _ this.  _ This reality where the first thing Andrew does every morning is get out of bed, get dressed as quickly as possible, and willingly walk up four flights of stairs to meet Neil at the halfway point between their common rooms so they can go to breakfast together. This reality where he thinks of Neil’s safety before his own, lies awake at night wondering how he can protect Neil from anything that tries to hurt him. This reality where there’s a human being in the world whose presence is somehow soothing to Andrew rather than grating; the mere existence of a person who feels completely and totally  _ safe  _ in his constant place behind Andrew’s shoulder.

Andrew knows their expiration date is drawing nearer and nearer, becomes ever more aware of it with each new freak-out Neil has about his post graduation plans. For all Andrew knows, Neil could be thinking about going back to the muggle world to live with his shady uncle if all other plans fall through. The thought alone is painful in Andrew’s stomach.

Even when he gave in and let himself kiss Neil that first time, Andrew never meant for this to turn into anything. He’d thought, maybe, burning off his physical attraction to Neil would dampen all the other confusing bullshit swirling around in his brain. But no. Now he’s full up with ridiculous emotions he hadn’t budgeted for. And he can just tell that when Neil disappears, it’s going to be an even worse feeling than flying.

* * *

“Knock, knock.” Andrew doesn’t bother actually rapping on the door to Bee’s office when he walks in. Her office, the back room of a multi-level greenhouse accessible from the open-air corridor on the first floor, always has the door ajar, and she always welcomes visitors.

Professor Betsy Dobson is the Hogwarts Herbology professor, and head of Hufflepuff house. In his seven years at the castle, Andrew would not say he’s been  _ fond  _ of a single professor, but… well. Professor Dobson had dealt with Andrew in his first few years at school, when he was a darkly troubled child lashing out in every direction, in ways other than just throwing him in detention and making his life worse. Since then, he’s taken advantage of her open-door policy more than once. Sometimes he comes to her office just to drink hot chocolate. Sometimes he comes to mess up all the carefully-organised potted plants, but she never gets annoyed.

Today, she’s grading papers when he enters. Her desk is glass, with the vines of several strange plants growing up the sides of it; as Andrew walks in, one of the vines unwraps itself and begins snaking towards him. But Bee looks up and clicks her fingers, and the plant slinks back into place.

“Andrew, hello.” She smiles as if she’s not surprised to see him, although Andrew had skipped the appointment time for their  _ actual  _ mandated career counselling session last month and hasn’t been to see her since. “Please, take a seat. Would you like a hot chocolate?”

“Why do you think I’m here?” Andrew says, as if he can’t get perfectly good hot chocolate in the kitchens. He sits sideways in the plush green chair opposite her, and she waves her wand, a little kettle in the corner immediately boiling itself and granules of chocolate beginning to float out of a porcelain pot and into two mugs. Andrew needs to remember to learn that spell from her before he leaves.

“So, other than the hot chocolate, is there anything I can help you with?” Bee asks, once their mugs have floated over and landed in front of them. It’s warm in the greenhouse in the summer, and Andrew thinks the hot drink should probably be unpleasant, but he enjoys his first sip anyway. Bee gives him a long moment of silence before saying, “I notice you didn’t come to your career counselling session last month. They are technically mandatory, but I didn’t follow up, because I know you usually like to work things out for yourself.”

“Just because everyone else needs to be hand-held through something so boring as choosing a job,” Andrew mutters, drinking some more hot chocolate.

“Well, I wouldn’t call it  _ hand-holding.  _ It can sometimes be useful to have advice from someone who’s been through something before, and especially someone who has been particularly resourced to advise on all sorts of careers in the magical world. And, of course, even if I don’t know something helpful to you, I can probably put you in contact with someone who works in a field you’re interested in.”

“I’m not interested in anything,” Andrew says, and then, because she doesn't immediately reply, he practices more honesty than he’s used to, and adds, “That’s the problem.”

“That does sound difficult,” Bee agrees. Part of why he likes talking to her is because she always keeps her voice so neutral, no matter what he says. “So do you have any ideas what you might be intending to do after school? Remember, the first job you get doesn’t have to be what you stick at forever, so it’s completely fine if your answer is just that you’d like to try some different things out.”

Andrew lets out a long breath, staring grouchily down into his hot chocolate. He’s not good at this ––  _ explaining _ part. Andrew has spent a huge amount of his life analysing his own emotions and unpacking everything about himself and trying to move forwards from it, but when it gets to saying any of it out loud, it’s like his jaw locks down and won’t even let the words out.

Eventually, through gritted teeth, he says, “I don’t want to try anything. But all these fucking Quidditch teams keep owling me. I could make a lot of money playing professional Quidditch, and be with –– some people I wouldn’t hate being around. But I don’t like playing it. But I also don’t like doing anything  _ else.” _

It’s the first time he’s laid it out in such simple terms. Although Kevin and Neil both know how Andrew feels about Quidditch, really, he hasn’t quite just ––  _ said  _ it, like that, because it’s fun driving Kevin crazy by refusing to explain why he doesn’t want to go pro, and because he and Neil rarely talk about the future because it stresses Neil out. Andrew wasn’t expecting it to feel relieving to say something so obvious out loud, 

“That sounds complicated,” Bee says. “You’ve laid out a couple of pros there, but also one pretty serious con. I would never advise you to do something you don’t like doing.” She pauses, looks at him in that way only Bee can. “You say you’ve been contacted by some teams. It sounds like you’re quite a desirable prospect. Have any of them offered you a contract?” Andrew shrugs, which means yes. “Have you considered negotiating that? What if you asked for only a year-long contract, to see if it’s something you wouldn’t mind doing as a longer career? Surely you could handle doing just about anything for a year. And I’d be happy to put you in touch with my friend at the Diagon Alley Law Firm, if you need help with contract negotiations.”

_ Negotiations.  _ It’s something that Andrew hasn’t considered in quite such terms before. He knows he’s good. He knows at least four teams are very keen to sign him as their own, at least partly to keep him away from their rivals. But Andrew doesn’t spend much time thinking of himself as a  _ commodity. _

A shorter contract is a good idea, but it gets Andrew wondering about just what else he could request, if he’s so damn wanted.

“Good chat, Bee,” he says, downing the rest of his hot chocolate and walking out of her office without saying anything else. She calls something encouraging out after him, but Andrew ignores it. He’s got some letters to write.

* * *

“Okay, so none of us thought we’d be here.” It’s not the most inspiring start to a pre-game speech Andrew has ever heard, but Matt’s got his game face on and clearly the younger players on the team, at least, are enraptured by him. “We had a rough start to the season, but the fact that we turned it around is a testament to  _ all  _ of our hard work. And now you can all say that you took Hufflepuff to the Quidditch finals for the first time in a generation! We’ve just gotta push through this final match that same way, okay? And hey, for some of us it’s gonna be our last match on this pitch, so let’s really make it count out there, and have some fun at the same time. You with me?”

Andrew turns away from the gaggle of younger Hufflepuffs crowding around Matt for high fives, and heads out onto the pitch. Better to get this over with.

Nobody expected the finals this year to be Hufflepuff vs Slytherin. Usually Gryffindor vs Slytherin is the match everyone gets excited about, historic rivalries and all, but it seems like the whole school has still turned out for this –– having Kevin on the Slytherin team has made just about everything about Hogwarts Quidditch get more exciting to the droning masses. The crowds in each of the stands are roaring with various inane chants, and it’s an effort on Andrew’s part to tune it all out. As the two teams line up beforehand and Matt and Kevin shake hands, Andrew meets Neil’s eyes across the line.

Neil grins at him, cockier than ever, and visibly tightens his grip around his broomstick with a wink. Andrew feels a furious spark in his stomach and thinks,  _ what if this wasn’t like every other match? _

Professor Wymack blows his whistle, and the teams shoot off into the air. Heading right to his hoops, Andrew immediately loses sight of Neil, but the thought still won’t let go of him.

Being on the pitch is as unpleasant as ever, and the bright May weather isn’t helping anything. Andrew can feel the summer sun beating down onto the back of his neck, undoubtedly turning it pink, and the sharp breeze rushing past him, and the way the air is just a little thinner up here when he drags it into his lungs. If he looks down he’ll be struck through with vertigo, so instead he grounds himself by focusing on the physical sensations — the way even their summer Quidditch uniforms involve too much heavy leather padding to be pleasant in the direct sunshine, how he can already feel sweat pooling in his collarbone and at the backs of his knees. And, of course, the shouts of the other players being carried on the breeze as they frantically chase the quaffle, and the muffled chants of the crowd below.

Andrew tunes as much of that out as he can, and focuses on his hoops. He feels the three large holes of empty space behind him like living creatures, and their presence beats right into his veins. Up here, when he’s not thinking about how much he hates this game or how much he just wants to annoy Kevin, Andrew can tune into that feeling completely, and the thing Kevin is always trying to unlock on him, the talent Neil always complains he’s  _ wasting,  _ feels like a tangible object Andrew can take hold of. Usually, he shoves it away.

But today he looks across the pitch, squinting through the sunlight, and sees the ridiculously serious furrowed brow on Kevin’s face as he chases the Quaffle. Remembers Neil winking at him, oh-so-cocky.  _ Wouldn’t it be funny,  _ Andrew thinks to himself,  _ if they got their asses handed to them. _

And Andrew does something he’s never done before, maybe because he’s not been able to or maybe he’s just never tried. He shuts down the hoops against Kevin.

He doesn’t know what takes hold of him, a sort of motivation he can’t remember feeling since childhood, a decisiveness that’s been stamped into apathy by the cruel world around him. And, as it turns out, trying suits him pretty well. The match rages on, each team getting more and more frantic, but after an hour of sweating in the summer sun, Slytherin has made eighteen shots on the hoops, and Andrew has blocked every single one of them.

His own hoops are really all Andrew cares about, more than the outcome of the match, but across the pitch Renee is really no match for Matt and the other Hufflepuff chasers, and it doesn’t escape Andrew’s attention every time the announcer’s voice booms out from the stands below announcing Hufflepuff have scored more points. Slytherin’s strength is in their offensive line, which is no use if Andrew’s shutting down the hoops completely. The expression on Kevin’s face, increasingly maddened every time he swoops near to the goals only to be blocked, is one of the most satisfying things Andrew has ever seen.

“You have to pick  _ today  _ to start trying?” he screams through the air from a few meters away, when Andrew catches the Quaffle on the very edges of his fingertips once again and throws it off towards Matt.

For a moment, Andrew feels an uncomfortable twinge in his face –– and then he realises he’s grinning. He smiles so rarely that the motion feels completely foreign to him; he hadn’t even known his mouth could still do that. But the wind is whipping fast around him and the hot sunshine above is warming up the heights-fuelled adrenaline running through his veins, and he keeps not letting Kevin score.

Andrew finds himself stretching to use all those moves Kevin’s always told him to practice and Andrew has refused –– he finds himself tapping in, for once, to his stupid eidetic memory in a  _ good  _ way, thinking back to strategies he’d been desperate not to remember at the time. He taps into five years on the Quidditch team to remember every time he’s played against the people on this team or every rant of Kevin’s about his own team’s weaknesses that he’d assumed Andrew wasn’t listening to, and he remembers what all of them are going to do. Kevin looks close to pulling his hair out, and then he just gets a determined look, setting his jaw and hunching his shoulders to fly faster than he ever does in school matches.

Andrew’s not sure he’s ever felt more satisfied. It’s like his insides are lighting up. Maybe, he thinks, all he ever needed to enjoy this damn game was to remember how fun it is to be  _ petty. _

As the match draws into its second hour with the snitch still out of sight, it gets harder. Kevin eventually does slip one goal through, aiming to the upper corner of the left-hand hoop, which he only knows is Andrew’s blindspot because of their extensive night practices, and then a second one when Andrew is distracted by the sight of Neil flying directly over his head. But Hufflepuff’s points are still racked up, and Andrew has a hard time believing Slytherin could come back from this with goals alone. Of course, Neil is a thousand times better than their seeker, and is probably going to catch the snitch. But, Andrew thinks, you never know.

At the start of the third hour, the quaffle is at the other end of the pitch and Andrew is taking the opportunity to unbuckle his leather helmet and wipe the sweat from his brow, not paying attention, when all of a sudden an almighty roar comes from the Slytherin stands –– Andrew looks up and realises that Neil Josten is holding onto his broom with just his thighs, both hands clasped above his head and an ear-splitting grin on his face. “ _ AND SLYTHERIN CATCH THE SNITCH!”  _ the announcer’s magically-enhanced voice booms below them.

It takes the rest of the world about ten seconds to catch up with what Andrew already knows. Neil has caught the snitch in some dashingly ridiculous way, no doubt, but he’s miscalculated. Matt and the other chasers have racked up so many goals against Renee that it doesn’t matter.

Slytherin get the snitch, but Hufflepuff win the match by ten points.

The cheers from the Slytherin section turn to confused murmurs, and then quiet completely, and suddenly screams from the yellow stands are echoing even louder around them. Blurs of yellow streak through the air towards Andrew, his team; they’re all screaming too, knocking into each other in a great jumble of celebration, throwing arms across each other’s shoulders and nearly knocking each other off their brooms before they finally descend upon Andrew in a gaggle.

“That was  _ amazing,”  _ Matt gasps, wiping his sweaty face and going to tussle Andrew’s hair.

Andrew shoves the entire team away, and kicks off towards the ground immediately. There’s still no satisfaction for him in their celebrations, or in the way the crowds are erupting.

There is, though, some satisfaction in the way Neil looks at him on the ground, that cocky look on his face completely wiped blank, but a starry fog in his eyes. He shouldn’t look so attractive all sweaty and ruffled with a sunburn-red nose, but he does.

Usually, there’s some order after a match –– the teams lining up to shake hands, everyone filing off to their changing rooms as the crowds disperse –– but today is just utter chaos. It’s the final match of the year, so people’s parents are here, and visitors from outside school, who all mob the pitch as soon as the final whistle blows. The commentator is leading a Hufflepuff victory chant up in the stands, and firework charms are shooting off left and right. In the chaos of celebration, it’s easy for Andrew to corner Neil, tap him with the end of his broomstick, and lead him discreetly off to the dusty supply shed behind the pitch.

“You are so fucking infuriating,” Neil tells him, panting and out of breath, as soon as they close the creaky wooden door behind them. His hands twine in the front of Andrew’s Quidditch robes, but don’t push any further. “But that was  _ so  _ fucking hot. You’re amazing, Andrew.”

Andrew shoves Neil against the wall, sending a random assortment of old leather gloves and a tin of broomstick polish tumbling off a shelf with the force, gets to his knees, and blows him. The fact that they’re both sweaty and gross and sore doesn’t matter. They’re both buzzing with adrenaline; Neil’s gasping within minutes, and doesn’t even mention that he’s probably missing Kevin’s commiseration speech. The unexpected spark Andrew felt during this Quidditch match is still nothing compared to how he feels doing this, nothing compared to how he feels about  _ Neil.  _ It’s infuriating, and Andrew still hates it –– he also can’t stop himself from chasing the feeling for as long as he can.

“So you enjoyed that?” Andrew asks sarcastically, as he’s pulling off and wiping come from the edge of his mouth. Neil’s eyes are glassy and his chest is heaving harder than when he stepped off the pitch earlier. Andrew does up the laces on his Quidditch trousers for him, since Neil’s hands are clearly shaking too much to be any use at all.

“Fuck you,” Neil mumbles, but he’s smiling as he drags Andrew up and into a kiss. Andrew tolerates it –– okay, drowns in it –– for a few seconds before pulling away.

“No time for that,” he says casually, straightening out his own robes. “You’ll miss talking to the scouts.”

Neil freezes against him.

“What?” he asks. It’s always a sign of good things, Andrew thinks, when he manages to get Neil monosyllabic.

“Oh, just that I invited scouts from Puddlemere, the Cannons, and the Magpies to the match today. They’d been hounding me for ages, so I said if they wanted to come see me play, they should pay attention to the other people on the pitch, too. I imagine some of them want to talk to you even more than they want to talk to me, now.”

It’s a situation unlike anything they’ve experienced together before, but Andrew recognises the expression on Neil’s face instantly: it’s his  _ junkie  _ look. The sex-haze fades from him immediately and is replaced by a slack jawed, 

“Andrew! They’re –– I don’t even know what to say –– but how could you drag me away while there are scouts here! Ahh! What if they were looking for us and we’ve disappeared because you were –– were ––”

“Blowing you?” Andrew offers, unimpressed. “I figured it was a safe bet considering you never last more than three minutes.”

“ _ Andrew!”  _ Neil objects, slapping Andrew in the chest, and Andrew snorts. “This is so fucking important, I can’t –– I don’t even know what to do with you!”

“Just get out there, moron,” Andrew says, and shoves Neil back through the door. Out on the pitch, the celebration is still raging, and nobody is any the wiser that they were gone.

“Are you coming with me?” Neil asks, turning around as he straightens his robes. With Andrew still inside the dingy supply shed, Neil looks completely haloed by the sunshine and firework charms behind him; Andrew, pathetically, feels his breath catch for a moment.

“Yes, asshole, I’m coming with you,” Andrew says, and they walk out into the sun together.

**JUNE**

In the grand scheme of things, Andrew thinks he cares slightly more about school than he does about Quidditch –– but that’s not saying much. Now that he has a comfortable offer from Puddlemere United and no real reason not to take it, the dawning of exam season doesn’t have much impact on Andrew.

Of course, he’s pretty confident he’ll ace it all anyway. Benefits of an eidetic memory. His friends aren’t so confident; Aaron is studying himself into an early grave to make sure he gets into the Mungo’s healer programme, and Kevin starts spouting random History of Magic facts at you any time you get within six feet of them.

On the other side of the scale is Neil, who, like the total disaster he is, doesn’t seem to care about studying at all.

Even with the scouts from their game last month, though, Neil doesn’t actually have an  _ offer  _ from a Quidditch team to sign, so failing everything would still be a very bad idea. Fuming at himself for doing it, Andrew starts dragging Neil to the library every day to study, at least for his own damn good.

Unfortunately for Andrew, the way Neil looks in the summer sun –– his shirt rolled up to his elbows and his tie off, his hair tinted bright red in the light through the stained glass windows, and the messy way he refills his ink pots which always means he’s wiping his fingers –– well. It quickly devolves into Andrew dragging Neil back to the darkest corner beside the restricted section and kissing him against the dusty stacks.

“You can’t keep complaining about me never studying when you’re the one who distracts me,” Neil says afterwards, grinning, with his hands fisted in the front of Andrew’s shirt.

“I can do what I want,” Andrew says.

He does  _ try,  _ though. He thinks maybe somewhere quieter would force Neil to study, so lugs all their textbooks up to the Astronomy tower the next evening –– but it would be a shame to  _ waste  _ such a secluded moment. He ends up with his hands down Neil’s pants. Neil still doesn’t study.

The next day, they go outside, where the majority of students are. Even in the flurry of end of year exams, with the particular stress from the fifth and seventh years, the warmth and sunshine on Hogwarts’ sprawling grounds are alluring. They sit on a bank at the edge of the lake, shoes off and feet dangling into the cool water below, Andrew working his way through a tower of snacks while Neil stares fruitlessly at his books. They can’t get distracted by each other with so many other people around, so that’s a bonus –– but on the downside, there are  _ so many people around.  _ A screeching group of second years cannon-ball into the water in front of them; a nauseating couple on a picnic blanket giggle beneath a nearby tree.

“We could go study at the pitch,” Neil suggests hopefully, after the third time they’re hit with a flurry of petals from an errant flower-shower spell some fifth years are practicing behind them. “It’s probably quiet there, with the season being over and everything.”

“I’m not an idiot _.  _ You wouldn’t get  _ any  _ studying done at the pitch.”

“We could just sit in the stands. We wouldn’t go flying or anything.” Neil’s doing that pouty thing that he thinks works on Andrew, but it doesn’t. It  _ doesn’t.  _ “It might help me focus!”

Andrew weighs his options, takes Neil’s textbook out of his hands, and shoves him into the lake.

The next day, they do go to study at the Quidditch pitch, with Kevin in tow. They sit in the stands with their books for a grand total of ten minutes before Neil gets fidgety and Kevin suggests running some drills. Andrew dumps both their textbooks off the top of the stands and watches them plummet down to the grass below.

Their first exam is Defence Against the Dark Arts on the 9th of June. On the 8th of June, a huge white owl lands in front of Neil at breakfast.

Neil had been halfway through an argument about international team rankings with Kevin, but he stops in his tracks, his cup of pumpkin juice suspended halfway towards his mouth. 

“Who’s that from, and could they please train their owl to not land in my fucking breakfast?” Aaron says grouchily. He’s been in a rotten mood for the past month; Andrew doesn’t know whether to attribute it to exam stress or ‘found out I have a gay brother’ stress, but he’s losing his patience with it.

Neil, for once, doesn’t pay any attention to Aaron’s snark. He puts down his juice, opens the letter, and goes silent for a full minute, just staring.

“It’s from Puddlemere,” he eventually says. His mouth dumbly opens and closes a few times. “They –– want to sign me. Right after graduation. I’d just be a sub right now but their seeker is looking to retire in the next two years. I –– they’d want me for at least that long.”

Andrew wants to say something dry in response, because he’s truly not surprised, but it catches in his throat when Neil turns to him. He’s always gorgeous, but right then, there’s something shining bright in his eyes that Andrew has never really seen in him before. Hope, maybe. A single moment unburdened by his past. It’s beyond gorgeous; it makes his ice blue eyes look more like diamonds. He sways closer to Andrew, like he needs to ground himself with the contact, and for a moment Andrew finds himself unconsciously swaying closer too. Their knees press together on the bench.

Then, of course, everyone around them erupts, and Andrew is saved from doing something stupid. Kevin, despite having said a hundred times that he thought Neil had the talent to make it to the pros, grabs the letter to read it for himself and then reaches across to ruffle Neil’s hair with tears in his eyes; someone at the Gryffindor table shouts  _ what’s going on, Neil?  _ and three seconds later Matt Boyd is leaping over an entire breakfast table to envelop him in a huge hug. As soon as the commotion spreads, other people start coming over too

“I can’t believe it,” Neil says, breathless and bright eyed. “I’m going to play Quidditch. For  _ real.  _ I don’t have to worry about what I’m going to do anymore. _ ” _

Andrew just rolls his eyes at the whole celebration. There’s all his attempts at getting Neil to study gone to waste. “Great. Now he’s not even going to  _ try  _ and pass NEWTs.”

* * *

_  
  
_

For all the build-up over it, exams pass by in a flash. Andrew only has six –– three written and three practical –– and despite barely studying or really putting any effort in at all, he’s fairly sure he’s aced them all. It’s hard to believe that this is the culmination of his entire Hogwarts career, six hours spent sitting in a stone hall with a stuffy ministry professional hovering over his shoulder, and then just… nothing.

“Your mastery of Defence is quite remarkable for someone your age,” the practitioner says at the end of his final exam, marking a few things down on the sheet of parchment in front of him with a long quill. “It’s only a shame that you can’t produce a patronus. Most career paths centered around Defence Against the Dark Arts do look for that.” 

Andrew just snorts and walks off. Luckily he has no interest in those careers, because the manifestation of pure happiness has never been on the cards for him. Not even when he leaves the Great Hall and sees Neil waiting for him, lounging against the wall with his tie undone and his hair messy, eyes sparkling in the sunlight.  _ Definitely  _ not even then, Andrew tells himself, even though the way his heart jumps at the sight is something he’s never felt before.

“Let me guess, you didn’t even turn up,” he says mockingly, reaching Neil. He can’t help standing an inch closer than anyone would really consider casual, drinking in the heat from Neil’s body. Luckily the other seventh years are too distracted to pay attention to them; they’re all busy shouting with celebration and jumping all over each other in their hurry to get outside to the sunlight.

“Andrew, I was in the same hall as you,” Neil says, rolling his eyes. “And I managed almost all the spells. Not that it matters –– I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I’m actually going to be a professional Quidditch star.”

He puts on a shit-eating grin, and Andrew reaches out to shove his head away.

“A professional moron, brilliant. I don’t know why I put up with you.”

“Hmm, me neither,” Neil says, but he’s still grinning. His face gets a little more serious then, though, and as the last of the other students file out of the room, Neil sways closer, breathing in Andrew’s air, and says, “Come to the pitch with me on Friday night? Just us. Kevin will be too busy packing up the dorm to care about practice.”

And because Andrew is an idiot, and even though he would rather be  _ anywhere  _ else on his last night at Hogwarts than the Quidditch pitch, he agrees.

* * *

On the last night he will ever spend at Hogwarts, instead of getting into bed at 11PM and getting a good night’s sleep for the travel the next day, Andrew sneaks out of the Hufflepuff common room and up to the entrance hall. Neil is there already, wearing his Slytherin Quidditch jersey and leggings but no pads, his floppy curls pushed back by a green bandana. He looks ridiculously handsome in the torchlight. 

“Let’s get this over with,” Andrew grumbles, and lets Neil lead him out to the pitch.

At least it’s a warm night, the summer air playing gently around them as they traipse across the grounds –– night practices in winter were the bane of Andrew’s entire existence. As soon as they reach the pitch, Neil hops right onto his broom and kicks off into the air, zooming fast towards the hoops. Cursing every single fault of man and nature that made him get to this point, Andrew follows.

“Last time on this pitch,” Neil observes, when Andrew finally catches up to him. “Isn’t it crazy? I mean, you played here for way longer than me, does it feel weird?”

“I can’t wait to get away from this damn place,” Andrew says, truthfully, although it makes Neil laugh.

“Alright, alright, I should know better than to try and have a sentimental conversation with you.”

“You should know better than to do a lot of the things you do,” Andrew points out, since he, unfortunately, doesn’t like the idea of Neil feeling like he  _ can’t  _ talk to him. “It hasn’t stopped you before.”

“That’s true. I like to think my relentless inability to follow instruction is what won  _ you _ over.”

“Who says I’m won over?” Andrew grouches, but then Neil grins and zooms off on his broom, circling higher and higher, and Andrew, the fool that he is, follows.

They’re higher up now than Andrew ever gets defending the hoops, and his stomach is churning with dizzy queasiness. He eventually catches Neil, but he knows it’s only because Neil let him; Andrew reaches out and grabs hold of the front of his broom to stop him from flying off again.

“Stop that, or we’re going inside.”

“No fair,” Neil complains. “I want one last night to fly around the pitch. Come on, Andrew, I’m moving back in with my uncle tomorrow. My _muggle_ uncle. I might not be able to fly again until team training camp starts. Plus living with him is going to be a nightmare, considering what he does for a job.”

The flip in Andrew’s stomach when Neil mentions moving in with his uncle is even more unpleasant than the vertigo. He’s startled to realise this, and for a moment, it makes him incredibly, incredibly dumb. He lets go of Neil’s broom, and Neil circles a little higher, but before he can get too far, Andrew calls out to him.

“So don’t move back, if you’re dreading it so much,” he says. “Just stay at the Hogsmeade flat with me.”

Neil’s eyes go wide in the moonlight, and he stops in midair, staring down at Andrew from a few feet above. 

“R-really?”

“I’ll be apparating to Puddlemere every day anyway,” Andrew points out. “Which is all your fault, so the least you could do is not make me suffer it alone.”

“You wouldn’t mind having me around that much, though?” Neil asks. Andrew swallows, hard, against the welling up of all the feelings he doesn’t want to say. Yes, he’ll mind having Neil around –– that’s the good thing. And the bad thing. None of it’s perfect or clear, but Andrew just knows that he doesn’t want Neil going so far away, even if it would be pretty easy to visit each other. He’s just started getting used to having Neil around all the time, though. He doesn’t want that taken away from him now. It’s too fast; he hasn’t filled up on Neil yet.

“Just move in, before I change my mind,” Andrew says. “Is it a yes or no?”

“Yes,” says Neil, immediately, “Of course it’s a yes.”

And then, making Andrew’s heart stop for a full second, Neil crosses his ankles and spins upside-down on his broom, his face suddenly dangling right in front of Andrew’s.

“You’re going to get yourself  _ kille––”  _ Andrew is cut off by Neil’s mouth against his. Kissing like this is ridiculous, Neil’s face the wrong way around, his chin bumping into Andrew’s nose. But –– well. With the whole world silent, the mountains in the distance and the castle behind them, surrounded by the walm, balmy air of the summer night, Andrew finds himself not wanting to protest. He keeps a white-knuckled grip on his broom, but he lets Neil kiss him, and kiss him, and kiss him, out beneath the stars, until Andrew forgets how to breathe.

All things considered, Andrew thinks he is leaving Hogwarts better than he started it.

**JULY**

“That can’t be  _ all  _ you have,” Nicky says, prodding at the ratty brown backpack slung over Neil’s shoulder as he walks into the house. 

Batting Nicky’s hand away awkwardly, Neil sidles past with his back against the corridor wall. “There’s an undetectable extension charm on it.”

Andrew, who knows Neil still has about three possessions rattling around in that huge empty space, snorts; the huge trunk of stuff he’s levitating in front of him bumps into Nicky. “Yeah, look out. Who knows how many bodies he’s got hidden in there.”

“We can make it one more if you don’t shut up,” Neil suggests. Nicky blanches as though he thinks he really just witnessed a murder threat; Andrew knows this is just Neil’s way of flirting.

From the kitchen to their right, Erik’s head suddenly pops out.

“Hi, guys!” he says. He’s wearing a frilly apron over his ridiculously broad, 6’2” athlete’s body. He wipes his hands on the apron and offers one to Neil. “Neil, ja? I remember you from Christmas.”  
  
“Uh, yeah,” Neil agrees, giving an uncomfortable glance back at Andrew, but shaking Erik’s hand regardless. Erik’s handshake is large and enthusiastic and Andrew doesn’t miss Neil immediately sliding his hands into his pockets when he escapes it, looking like he never wants to submit to that torture again. Andrew nearly laughs, but then his cousin appears right in front of his face again.

“We were waiting until you got home to tell you,” Nicky says. Andrew realises all of a sudden that his cousin’s excitement might not be solely directed at them, and a feeling of dread spreads in his stomach. “I know I should at least let you put your stuff away first but oh  _ Merlin  _ I can’t wait! There was finally an opening in the Ministry here so Erik can  _ transfer!  _ He’s moving in as soon as he starts! So I guess we’re gonna have a full house around here!” 

Oh, Merlin. Living with his brother and cousin was already a lot; one more person is the last thing Andrew needs.

“Erm, congratulations,” Neil says, while Erik twines an arm around Nicky’s shoulder to tug him backwards and Nicky dissolves into peals of happy laughter. “I’m gonna go unpack.”

Andrew lingers for a moment longer after Neil disappears down the corridor, waiting for Nicky to stop play-wrestling Erik and look back up. When he finally does, laughter failing, Andrew meets his cousin’s eyes for a second.

Andrew’s always seen the evidence of it, and it seems to remain true: around Erik, Nicky is not just putting up the protective mask of cheerfulness like he usually is. He actually looks happy, in a way that shines a little too much light on just how much he’s suffered the rest of the time. As irritating as it’s going to be to live with that giddy lovebird energy, Andrew couldn’t deny his cousin that happiness. He nods at Nicky once, and then at Erik, and silently disappears down the hall to join Neil.

In Andrew’s bedroom, Neil has actually made no attempt at unpacking, just dumped his backpack in the corner and flung himself back on the bed. That’s fine with Andrew. 

They spend a while in Andrew’s room, making out on top of the bed. Andrew considers taking it further, but they don’t; for once, it doesn’t feel urgent. They have plenty of time.

They only venture back out when it’s dinnertime and Neil’s stomach is rumbling loud enough to have Andrew annoyed, and as soon as they leave Andrew’s room, they bump into Aaron. He’d lingered saying goodbye to Kaitlyn at Hogsmeade station, even though they’d be seeing each other again in two days when they start at Mungo’s healer training program, so he’s later arriving at the flat than they were. He’s dragging his trunk behind him, a medical textbook in his hand, but freezes when he sees them.

“Hey,” Aaron says, kind of awkwardly. His gaze flits between Andrew and Neil, the way Neil is following an inch behind Andrew, close enough that their shoulders bump when Andrew draws up short in the doorway. Andrew just raises an eyebrow, silent, but then Aaron says, “Alright, Neil?”

Neil gapes for a moment, and then says, “Er, yeah. You?”

“Yeah.” Aaron lingers for one more awkward beat, nods, and then disappears into his room.

Well. Andrew and Neil share a sideways look.

“That was weird,” Neil says. “Is he finally pulling his head out of his ass?”

“I wouldn’t count on it. With how deep it’s up there, it could take years,” Andrew says, but he can’t help but –– well. There’s an odd feeling in his stomach which is, perhaps, the first itch of being  _ slightly  _ less fatalistic about his relationship with his brother for the rest of their lives.

Dinner is loud and chaotic and Neil and Andrew retire to bed earlier than anyone else. Well, sort of to bed –– first, they make good use of the soundproofing charms Andrew is getting so good at. But in the morning, when that spell has long worn off, Andrew jerks awake at 6AM. It takes him a moment to realise it’s not because of the confusing presence of another softly snoring body in bed with him, but because of a rap at the window. An owl.

Andrew rolls up the blinds and opens the window with a glare, and the owl drops a howler on his lap before flying away.

_ “DON’T FORGET PRACTICE! IF WE DON’T GIVE IT OUR ALL NOW, YOU’LL NEVER GET ON THE NATIONAL TEAM FOR THE NEXT CUP!”  _ Kevin’s voice bellows out, so loud it shakes the thin walls of the flat, before the howler goes up in a whoosh of flames and collapses as a small pile of ash on top of the duvet.

“What the fuck?” Neil mumbles blearily into the pillow, raising his head an inch and blinking up at Andrew.

“ _ Is KEVIN here too?”  _ Nicky’s voice screeches, muffled through the walls. “ _ ANDREW, how many boys do you have stashed away in there!” _

Across the hall, Aaron throws something at his bedroom door and it clatters loudly. “IT’S FUCKING SIX AM, SHUT UP!”

“ _ YOU  _ SHUT UP!”

Neil finally rolls over and looks up at Andrew, amusement in his eyes. The gentle summer sun streams through the window and paints pale gold across his freckled cheeks like a watercolour, splashing across his auburn hair as if it’s on fire. The soft hoot of the owl flying away echoes back to them, to mingle with the soft sound of Neil’s breathing. Neil’s blue eyes are buoyant and captivating in a particularly luxurious patch of sunlight.

“Let’s get our own place sooner rather than later,” Andrew grumbles, and leans down to give Neil a kiss. Neil gives into it for a moment, before pulling away with a grin, even as one of his hands comes up to brush Andrew’s shoulder.

“You sure? You sign a lease with me, that’s legally binding. You might be stuck with my annoying ass for an awfully long time.”

“A terrible fate,” Andrew agrees blandly, and kisses Neil again, once, twice, three times. “But I suppose I’m resigned to it, at this point.”

And even though he can still hear the others moving around in their own rooms, and even though they’ll have to roll out of bed soon and get ready for practice at a Quidditch job Andrew knows he’s going to hate, and even though nothing is set in stone and they have no idea where the future is headed, Andrew finds himself remarkably calm. Everything is perfect tranquility, nothing but the hum of magic in the air wrapping them up, just them, alone in the quiet space of their room. 

Andrew never thought he’d have this. For the first time, at least in the safety of his own mind, he can finally admit; he wants to see where life goes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> !! and before you do anything else pls go look at [the GORGEOUS art](https://black-glasses-and-books.tumblr.com/post/628616456700067840/my-piece-for-my-first-aftg-big-bang-prompt-this) of the broom kiss by black-glasses-and-books!! 
> 
> aaaand that's the fic! i really hope you guys enjoyed it; like i said, i wrote this ages ago now so i'm really glad to finally publish it and i hope it's been a good read? it was kinda a tough writing process so i'd love to know what you guys thought!
> 
> and again a HUGE thanks to my beta alonewithabook & my two AWESOME artists black-glasses-and-books & puffins-studio, without whom i probably definitely would not have finished this ❤️ 
> 
> you can find me on tumblr as acerenee or milominderbindered –– and do let me know if you'd like me to write more fics in this fandom, bc somehow despite loving these books for YEARS this is the first thing i've ever written them!

**Author's Note:**

> and there's the first three months! the next chapter will be up tomorrow. this was also my first eeeever fic for this fandom so pls let me know your thoughts in the comments, especially on characterisation, it would mean a lot!!!
> 
> you can find my not-super-active aftg tumblr at [acerenee](http://acerenee.tumblr.com) or my regular one at [milominderbindered](https://milominderbindered.tumblr.com)


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